Objects of desire.

LEORA LAOR

DVIR GALLERY

TEL-AVIV, ISRAEL

SEPTEMBER 1-OCTOBER 8, 2005

LEORA LAOR: IMAGES OF LIGHT

DAITER CONTEMPORARY

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

SEPTEMBER 9-OCTOBER 29, 2005

Fantastic, abstract imagery often serves the conscious mind by providing a memory or an obscure and vague object of desire that our imagination strains to capture. Despite our greatest efforts to comprehend the elusive image as a complete object and to strive toward the unfathomable, limited perception results. This attempt to elaborate on the bounded and yet unbounded human condition has been a central concern for philosophers and theologians who seek to define the individual's place in relation to the universe, nature, and God. Israeli photographer Leora Laor binds these phenomena of perception with human ephemerality by situating human figures on the enigmatic seam of life and death, reality and dream, routine and fantasy. Laor deals with the tension between the limited and the unlimited, the finite and the infinite, urging the spectator to attempt to unpack the ungivenness (1) of nature as well as human nature.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The photographs from Laor's series "Image of Light" were taken during twilight or at night. Thus, in these images light exists but has no direct affinity to luminescence. The result is that figures occupy an urban landscape from which they are alienated. Laor uses her digital video camera to capture still images, but she is also deeply influenced by the cinematic movement, filming short video clips from which she isolates individual frames. Both these technological processes allow her to create new dismantled works. The figures stand out clearly in the twilight from dramatic backgrounds that provide fantastic scenery where patches of light are invaded by dark shadows in vivid colors. She creates an intensified object, boundless and timeless, where uncanny colors formulate a new, unfamiliar, non-specific setting where human figures, which maintain anonymity, seem to grow from within. As a result, the backgrounds appear chaotic, emphasizing the frail human condition and arousing primal feelings of anxiety and the fear of death.

Laor works intuitively, freeing herself from conscious thought, with the intent to reach the irrational which is revealed in the powerful and vast landscape--a setting defined by Carl Jung as the central universal magical power founded at the bottom of our unconscious. Laor consistently pictures isolation, as exemplified in Image of Light #3 (2003) where two people walk through the wilderness. The image of the alienated figure is prevalent throughout her work. In Image of Light #12 (2003) the sole black silhouette of a woman is placed against an empty, red-hued backdrop of emptiness, indicating the concepts of awe-inspiring nature, death, the sublime, and life's inescapable void. The border where matter ends is emphasized. Similar to Ingmar Bergman's dance of death in The Seventh Seal (1956), one of the most famous images in film history, Laor sets her figure on the border between heaven and earth, emphasizing humanity's fragility and delicate temporality. Although the woman in the photograph is frail, she is situated on the central axis of the composition, manifesting the classical idea of a human being as a microcosm striving for knowledge. Laor's figure is prominent but the landscape is unfathomable; it is a great abiding object. The role of the image-as-silhouette is to make peace with the abstract landscape. The recognizable figure humanizes the amorphic void. The photograph is seen as a hallucination, a daydream or a fantasy, where the image signifies the real, the connection to our objective world whose survival keeps us from falling into the abyss. "The main concept is inaccessibility," remarks Laor, "the unlimited we cannot get rid of but we can also not find, and this is exactly why it cannot be avoided." (2)

Laor makes an interesting move in "Image of Light" by replacing the untamed and grand nature found in Romanticism for a municipal urban park charged with expressionism. She blurs the categories ascribed specifically to the external sublime and internal desire. In unifying Man and Nature, she comments on the transience of the human condition.

Laor's painterly way of thinking and striving toward aesthetic emptiness is further stressed in her words: "A perfect photograph will be white upon white, the perfect balance which can be obtained by nothingness. If you take a scale, it is perfectly balanced only when it carries nothing." (3) However, Laor is trying to reach the perfect void by material means, so she dismantles each image until the fleshiness of the print is exposed: "The monotonous infinite dismantling is acted upon in order to erase the living truth which is unique and in order to transfer it to the neutral totality of death," (4) she claims.

ADI LOURIA-HAYON is a graduate student in Art History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

NOTES

1. "Givenness" is used here as a term providing the measure of all comprehension. See Edmund Husserl, "Author's Preface to the English Edition," Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce-Gibson, (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1962), 6.

2. Interview with the author, September 2, 2005.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.