Events

It Looks Something Like This. Opening night

Hagit Barkai — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 02:32:32 +0000

"It Looks Something Like This" November 3rd

Hagit Barkai — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 23:57:03 +0000

Solo Show at Van Every Gallery, Davidson NC

Resistance Press Release

Hagit Barkai — Thu, 26 May 2011 16:56:27 +0000

Hagit Barkai: "Resistance"

opening reception Saturday June 4, 6 to 9 PM
exhibition runs through June 25, 2011

please note: new gallery hours Wed. Thurs, Fri. & Sat. Noon to 6 PM

Nau-haus Art, 223 E. 11th St. Houston TX, 77008

contact: Dan Allison dan@nau-haus.com
gallery phone: 281-615-4148
www.nau-haus.com

Good painting is always sincere. Great art is always honest, and artists arrive at greatness by channeling a burning desire. They take what is known and what is felt, and place it before us for our consideration so that we may stop a moment to think and feel a little more. Their original mark is as singular as a fingerprint and needs no comparison to the others for any reason other than historical reference. Originality is never the intent, but rather the result when the work has evolved from the inside out, from the heart of the individual and the burning desire that leads them.

We find Hagit Barkai and the evidence of her journey nearer the beginning than the end, but can still see an evolution from her earlier body of work. ......... Barkai's work is truthful and smart. She reminds us that we are not always pretty but sometimes just vulnerable, unaware and exposed. " I construct a space that is inhabitant by lives that are not fully there anymore, lives that are not fully there yet, and lives that are there but for one reason or another are not considered to be there." We need smart artists to challenge our preconceptions so that we might overcome the prejudice of our perspective and allow ourselves the happiness that comes from a wider view. Hagit Barkai demonstrates all the skill and desire she needs to share her vision, and the intelligence, honesty and heart to see it all. (view complete essay "Elegance and the Incomplete Idea" at link below)
DMA - Nau-haus 2011

read more about Hagit Barkai, reviews, images, essays, and biography here: http://www.texascollaborative.com/HagitBarkaiHTMLPage.html

Resistance. Solo show. June 4th, Nau-haus Art

Hagit Barkai — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 02:40:16 +0000

Resistance. Nau-haus Art. June 2011

Opening: June 4th, 6-9pm

Nau-haus Art

303 & 223 E. 11th St. Houston Texas, 77008 Houston Texas

With text by Surpik Angelini and Dan Allison

Gallery contact: info@nau-haus.com

The Seven At Canal

Hagit Barkai — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:23:09 +0000

Canal Street Gallery located at 2219 Canal St., Houston is proud to present seven local artists in a group
exhibition on August 6, 2010, 6-9pm.

A group exhibition featuring local Houston Artists working in different media: Painting, Printmaking and
Sculpture.

Please join us at the opening reception August 6. 6-9PM. 2219 Canal Street Houston, TX 77003
Artists include: Emily Sloan, Patrick Masterson, Armando Rodriguez, Merilee Minshew, Carlos
Hernandez, Hagit Barkai and Lenard Brown.

Integrazia אינטגרציה

Hagit Barkai — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 20:24:02 +0000

Integrazia.Group show curated by Moti Golan. Tel Aviv-Ayelet Hashachar Gallery. Kibutz Ayelet
Hashachar, Israel. July 2010

התערוכה 'אינטגרציה' נפתחה בגלריית "תל-אביב/איילת השחר" בקיבוץ איילתהשחר. אוצר התערוכה הוא מוטי גולן. בראיון משנת 2005 הוא אומר: "במלחמה לקיתי בהלם קרב קשה, ומשהו בפציעה עשה לי סוויץ'. מאז התחלתי לצייר עוד ועוד יצירות בנושא מיתוס הגיבור והלם קרב, שהציגו כיצד אנו, החיילים, נראינו מתחת למדים. י

Dirty Draw-ers

Hagit Barkai — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:31:29 +0000

Drawing performance with models outside of Art League Houston. July 7 6-9

Emily Sloan

"The Need For Additional Support" By Jenni Rebecca Stephenson. Absolutely! In The Loop Magazine.

Hagit Barkai — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:26:00 +0000

Absolutely in the Loop Magazine. by Jenni Rebecca Stephenson

Every day when we get dressed in the morning and look in the mirror, we face the issue of body image. So ingrained in us, it manifests in our walk, facial expressions and even in the way we relate to others. For personal or societal reasons, we often pair our body’s demand for support with aesthetic enhancement.In fact, some may even say that Victoria’s secret is necessary engineering! But, what is the relationship between support and enhancement really about? What are the motivations and results of this interplay? Attempting to address this question, Additional Support at Spacetaker’s Artist Resource Center features the paintings of Hagit Barkai, body casts from Kelley Devine and the small metal body ornaments of Jessica Jacobi.

All three artists are currently Houston residents, but Barkai’s roots are in Israel. Both a student of art and philosophy (receiving an MFA degree from Penn State University and a B.A. in Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), her work has been shown in exhibitions across the country– most recently, at the Art League Houston. Kelley Devine splits her time between art, motherhood and her entrepreneurial endeavors. She studied sculpture and visual arts at Southeastern Louisiana University and has been exhibited at various shows in the South. Jessica Jacobi is a homegrown Houstonian, having received her training at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas Tech University. She has been exhibited at national juried exhibitions, as well as at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft where she has been in residence.

Recently, we took a moment to ask the trio a few questions about themselves in relation to their art.

1. What is your biggest inspiration as an artist?

Jessica Jacobi (JJ): I am preoccupied with the relationships we form with our bodies, because it is through these relationships that we perceive the world. I constantly question our notions of acceptable body conditions and challenge accepted ideals.

Kelley Devine (KD): My inspiration comes from my life and how I feel about society. Art helps me be honest with myself.

Hagit Barkai (HB): I don’t think I got over him just yet. In opposition are the bodies around me, the subtle way they express themselves, the evasive ways they convey information.

2. Who or what has been the most influential to your work?

KD: The people around me are the most influential. Plus, I study many other artists and our environment. I love feedback!

HB: My teachers, painter friends and lots and lots of paintings have moved me over the years. Different philosophies and feminist writings have also influenced my process.

JJ: Those who are most dear to me play the most influential role. Observing the behavior of family and friends has opened a window into observing myself. This fuels the questions and subjects in my work.

3. What’s your favorite part of being an artist in Houston?

HB: The artists and friends I have met here and the fact that I can dedicate most of my working time to painting in my studio. Plus there are so many things going on here, many of which I don’t know about yet.

JJ: Houston’s size and diversity yield a range of opportunities for practicing artists. There is a welcoming attitude in this city and I find that very motivating.

KD: Houston Rocks! We have a lot of opportunities to show, learn and work here!

4. In your dream world, you would...

KD: Be respected for my work and able to support my family

with it.

JJ: Be able to share my work and interests with a large audience, and in turn, be exposed to their thoughts. So far, teaching has proved invaluable for this exciting process.

HB: There are some feminist writers that I would like to collaborate with one day.

Additionally Sublime by Dean Liscum

Hagit Barkai — Sun, 30 May 2010 04:00:00 +0000

From the blog: Is It Beautiful Yet? MAY 28, 2010

The Facebook invitation for "Additional Support" at SpaceTaker's ARC Gallery curated by Lindsey Peyton briefly described the show as "exploring the body's need for support - for aesthetic enhancement, for physical augmentation, and for societal acceptance - and demonstrating the tension between an acceptance of and repulsion to the body." Before seeing the show, the title did not move me. In other words, it didn't tap into my psyche and conjure up any pre-conceived notions. After experiencing the works, I felt the repulsion and felt the support was somewhat ironic. Corsets lined with nails, painfully pretty-fying prosethetics, and portraits of mental, physical, and psychological discomfort aren't exactly the kind of support anyone would want, be they fierce feminist or your average wallflower. It's the kind of support that women have been struggling against since Adam turned to Eve as they were being expelled from the garden of Eden and said, "that pelt makes your butt look big!"

Kelley Devine uses the irony of surrealism to rebel against that type of support. A multi-dimensional artists, her works in this show are sculptures, which I'd roughly describe as enhanced body casts and paper bikini's. (She's an excellent 2-D artist as you can judge for yourself at her website. http://www.kelleydevine.com/...one of the ironies is that Kelly Divine is a self-proclaimed "big butt pornstar" as I discovered when I misspelled Devine's name while googling her.)

The casts aren't subtle, but they're graceful. Imagine a Sports Illustrated model's breast and midriff fashioned into a corset. The inside is lined with nails creating for the potential wearer a figure if not to die for at least to suffer for. Both the theme and the technique are repeated in several other pieces. "Father" is a back replete with nails on the inside and the Lord's prayer scrawled along the spine. "Dressed Down" consists of chrome buttocks and lower back with nails on the inside, the ensemble resting on a petticoat. My favorite piece of Devine's, "Extended," is an arm span raised to 5 feet with white translucent fabric suspended from it and light illuminating the work from underneath. No nails.

The bikini's are playful casts in the same way the sculptures are beautiful, with a nail-jagged twist. Each piece is fashioned from the pages of a different symbolic text. "Wearing His Name" consists of sheets from a hymnal. "35 Fits Me Better Than 25" is made from a treatise on aging. "Nothing Left Hand" is select pages from the artist's divorce decree, and a fourth is fashioned from a dress pattern. The works resonate with a surrealist irony that echoes of Magritte--beautifully-crafted, beautiful and cruel.

For her part in this dialog about support, Jessica Jacobi (I couldn't find a website for her but I found her on Facebook) applies the notion of enhancement to herself. Her works explore the manipulation of the body through decorative machines. She's meticulously manufactured these wearable sculptures, which she refers to loosely as "jewelry" and installed them as standalone sculptures. However, the works come alive when they're put to work.

In a running video installation, Jacobi demonstrates the effect of each piece. This performance includes how one would apply such "jewelry" and the temporal effect that each piece has on the wearer after it is removed. The work is ornate, but scary as demonstrated in the piece used to advertise the show, "Cheekbone Enhancer." This pinches the check, pulling the cheek and lower eyelid from the eye and exposing the red connective tissue surrounding the socket. As she applies these enhancers with names like "Lip Plumper," which crimps and pinches the lip, "Dente Drip," which I'm not sure what it's enhancing but it involves a lot of fake blood, and "Pitter Pat," which binds to her ear, to her own body in the video, I try to maintain a scientific distance, circumnavigating both fear and fetish. The most playful of which is "Breast Sacs," two pendulous nylon sacks filled with scented vaseline and dangling from a clasp that one fastens to their person at either breast level or belt buckle level depending on your personal preference for the placement of pendulous appendages.

There's no hiding it. The re-figuring is dis-figuring and disturbing. If you've seen "Brazil," "Children of the Lost City," or even "Dead Ringers," you can imagine the conceit. The cruelty of the process is innate in the tools used to perform it and achieve the desired result. The wearable sculptures themselves have a medieval feel. Their own aesthetic alludes to the fact that neither the results nor the process are "natural" or "pretty." They're both quirky and quietly unsettling, which makes them oddly engaging.

Hagit Barkai wrestles differently than the rest.

I'm not proud of it, but as a viewer I'm relatively comfortable with gore and repression. Perhaps, that's too much psychological information on my part. Nevertheless, society's permissiveness and my viewing choices have rendered me thus. And thusly, I found Hagit Barkai's work (http://hagitbarkai.com/ the most disturbing pieces in the show. They're neither as surreal nor as direct as Devine and Jacobi's work. Yet, for me they are more viceral. Perhaps, it's her somber pallet. Perhaps, it's her mixture of oblique gestures and obscured facial expressions. Perhaps it's the ambiguous spaces that her figures occupy. Perhaps, it's all three. Nevertheless, her works inspire just the right amount of grief? uncertainty? fear? to momentarily disorient me. The experience conjures up the same feeling as when I am unexpectedly plunged into darkness: surprise and fear, closely followed by the sober recognition that nothing has happened...yet. I don't know who Hagit would list as her influences. I'd locate her work somewhere between Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. Howard Sherman (http://www.howardsherman.com) noted an affinity with the painter, Jean Rustin (http://www.rustin.be/). Nevertheless, if I were going to instruct someone on the gestural aesthetics of dislocation and dark forebodings, I'd set them in front of Barkai's "In Difference 4" or "Blindfold" or one form the "Vomiter" series, while I sought out a double-espresso and happy, canned jazz at my local coffee bar.

You might be tempted to criticize the art works in this show as hyperbolic, but are they really? In what we deem "Reality" in various cultures throughout the world, women inject the lethal toxin botulism, popularly known as Botox, into their bodies. They insert metal plates in their lips, have their necks artificially extended, and have their clitorises removed, all to achieve their local culture's idea of "good enough". In the conversation on feminism and womanhood, that kind of reality doesn't leave an artist much room either symbolically or metaphorically. In this show, I like each artist's tone. It's neither too subtle for my eye to see nor too shrill for my ear.

Kudos to the curator, Lindsey Peyton. I'm not sure how she knew to bring these three artist together, but I'm glad she did. The works are nicely intermingled: Hagit's pale nude woman with her head obscured by an ochre blotch adjacent to Jacobi's video of herself applying her jewelry; Devine's bikini's chorus lining in front of Barkai's "Indifference" series of men and women huddling/embracing with Jacobi's "Breast Sac" (vaseline filled nylon sacks) looming off to the side. The thoughtful arrangement ensures that the works compliment each other rather than compete.

...sometimes, defiance is beautiful.

Additional Support

Hagit Barkai — Sat, 08 May 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Spacetaker’s new gallery space features group exhibit: Additional Support
Artist Resource Center (ARC) Features Artists Hagit Barkai, Kelley Devine, and Jessica Jacobi During May

HOUSTON (May 4, 2010) - This May, the Spacetaker's Artist Resource Center (ARC) will host "Additional Support," a group exhibition featuring paintings by Hagit Barkai, body casting sculptures by Kelley Devine and small metal sculptures by Jessica Jacobi. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 9 PM on Saturday, May 15th, complete with a fashion show of the wearable works and a live body casting demonstration. The show will remain on display through June 19th, and the public is invited without charge. The featured artists are currently Houston residents and were chosen to exhibit together due to their respective works’ treatment of the human form.

About Additional Support:

Support: to be capable of bearing; withstand.

The body demands support due to numerous physical and psychical circumstances. As the body progresses through it’s lifetime, its natural framework is challenged, and the need for additional support is revealed through the body’s awkwardness, vulnerability, and visceral nature. In response, individuals and society create various tools to hide, enhance, or transform the body (i.e. undergarments, piercings, etc.), enabling it to function in an acceptable way within society. Additional Support explores possible manifestations of such creations– if a body accepts society’s methods of support, is the body in turn accepted by society? The work demonstrates tension between acceptance of and repulsion to the body, calling into question the motivations behind such judgments and redefining the notion of “misfit.” In exploring the body’s incongruence with its surroundings, the three bodies of work represent failed attempts to reconcile the physical image of the body with self-image. The exhibition also plays with the artwork’s need for support to assume meaning: from the video and performances supporting the wearable art and the cast hangers giving a sense of the missing body, to the paintings negotiations with the frame.

About the Artists:
Jessica Jacobi’s small metal sculptures are designed to question methods for defining acceptable body conditions. Originally from Houston, she received her B.F.A. in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin and her M. F. A. in Metals and Jewelry Design from Texas Tech University. She has exhibited at national juried exhibitions -- from Elder Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska to Meadows Gallery at the Center for the Visual Arts in Denton, Texas. She exhibited in 2008 Craft Texas show at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and her works have also been displayed at Runnels Gallery, Eastern New Mexico State University and Landmark Arts Studio Gallery at Texas Tech University School of Art.

Kelley Devine studied sculpture and visual arts at Southeastern Louisiana University and has now exhibited at various shows from Jonathan Ferrera Gallery in New Orleans and SLU Visual Arts Society Exhibitions in Hammond, La. to Galleria Lazzara and Sculptures by Design Studio in Houston. Devine describers herself as “a mother, artist, entrepreneur and student” and says her art helps her communicate what she sees as the opposing forces within the human psyche. “As a painter and a sculptor, I strive to incorporate the concept of how self-perception and internalization differs from the perceptions and assumptions of others, by combining materials, applications or images that are visually and psychologically contrary to one another.”
Originally from Israel, Hagit Barkai received an MFA degree from Penn State University, a B.A. in Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and also studied at the Jerusalem Studio School. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at Praxis Gallery, New York; Houston Art League; Chashama, Gallery, New York ; Crane Gallery, Philadelphia; Fe Gallery, Pittsburgh; and the Pennsylvania State Museum, in Harrisburg. She has been featured in the Houston Chronicle; the Pittsburgh City Paper, and in Research Penn State. Awards include the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship in Visual Arts in 2008, first place for the Visual Arts in the Graduate Research Exhibition at Penn State University in 2007, a travel grant to Israel from The School of Visual Arts at Penn State in 2006, and being selected to represent Penn State in the Big Ten Conference in Chicago in 2006.
Barkai said she looks at “body languages of vulnerability, awkwardness and misfits as expressions that move between acceptance and resistance.” She seeks to maintain balance between one’s struggles to gain visibility and struggles to escape it. “I paint bodies for what they fail to be, for how they fail to settle in any image or concept that confine and regulate them, and for how they are never able to close the gap between appearance and experience,” the artist explains. “I am painting in an attempt to capture this moment of losing and gaining respectability.
For more information about Spacetaker, visit the www.spacetaker.org.
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About Spacetaker:
Spacetaker is a 501(c)3 professional organization and Artist Resource Center located in Houston’s First Ward whose mission it to provide artists and small non-profits access to economic development, continuing education, and networking opportunities to support their professional growth. Spacetaker is located at 2101 Winter Street, Studio B11 Houston 77007.
www.spacetaker.org