5 works inspired by Dead Sea

5 works inspired by Dead Sea

Chiara Sabella · 1 year ago · Art

The Dead Sea, or Salty Sea, is one of the most interesting areas of our planet for several aspects. It is interesting from a geographical and morphological point of view, because it is located 430 meters below sea level and, reaching a depth of 790 meters, is to all intents and purposes the deepest and saltiest point on Earth. It is also from a political and territorial point of view since, since the United Nations Partition Plan came into force in 1947, its waters are divided between Jordan, Israel and Palestine. Finally, it is one of the most tangent examples of the consequences of climate change: the sun in the Middle East evaporates a quantity of water that can no longer be compensated by the old tributaries, causing a lowering of the water level of about one meter per year.

Poetry and history mix with the salt crystals, making this spiritual heritage a unique place for artists from around the world. It is through their works that we tell the story of an area destined to change over time.

Noam Bedein

According to photojournalist Noam Bedein, the Dead Sea is “far from dead.” Like his colleague Bronfer, he too has documented its nuances over the years. His shots seem to capture details of a distant planet, evidence of an extreme ecosystem that transforms bacteria and minerals into incredible colors, giving an evocative spectacle of mysterious shapes.

Spencer Tunick for the Dead Sea Museum

This precariousness prompted photographer Spencer Tunick just this week to return, ten years after the last time, to one of his favorite places with his “living” nude works. Like grains of salt, 300 volunteers from all over the world on Sunday participated in the shots by dipping their bodies in white paint. The performance is a moving cry and resumes the work in which the artist has immortalized 1200 people, in waters that have now disappeared: “Everything you see in my photographs of 2011 is no longer there.” The protest was a reaction to the closure of yet another beach, Mineral Beach, where the collapse of the ground prevented access. With these works, the photographer inaugurates the Dead Sea Museum foundation, the museum, currently virtual, where you can visit Spencer Tunick’s Dead Sea exhibit, including previously unseen shots, for free. The project “combines a centuries-old tradition of construction in the desert with the latest technology” explain the architects of the mueso, and aims to become a cultural center where art supports and enhances the territory.

The salt sculptures of Sigalit Landau

The delicacy of her portraits immortalizes the mirror of water and imprints it in the collective memory, like the objects of Sigalit Landau, the Israeli who sculpts with the help of the sea. Her works, suspended for months in the world’s saltiest basin, reveal its properties by covering themselves with fine salt crystals. The clothes reshaped by the sea show the contrast of a potentially destructive force, which has been healing man’s wounds since the beginning of time. Shoes and musical instruments are the precious relics of a place that speaks to us of continuous transformation. Symbolic in this sense is the artist’s Salt Stalagmite #1, a floating salt bridge that ideally unites Israel, Palestine and Jordan in the project.

The divided sea by Rayyane Tabet

According to the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, the Dead Sea is divided into three parts. The ripple effects that this decision produced on the territory become for Lebanese artist Rayyane Tabet the subject of the work The Dead Sea in Three Parts. Here the depths of the sea are broken into a sculpture that represents a geography and industrial policies far removed from the beauty of the place.

The street art of Minus 430 Gallery

In 2018, a number of urban artists from around the world came together to found Minus 430 Gallery, an art site 30 minutes outside of Jerusalem. Here, street artists united in a single cause breathed new life into the former Jordanian shelter. Thanks to colorful messages, the structures abandoned for more than 40 years shine again in a tribute to the Dead Sea: a cry for help that tells of a beauty to be protected.

5 works inspired by Dead Sea
Art
5 works inspired by Dead Sea
5 works inspired by Dead Sea
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Isabella Ståhl has returned to the North

Isabella Ståhl has returned to the North

Tommaso Berra · 5 days ago · Photography

Isabella Ståhl is a Swedish photographer who found herself rediscovering the landscapes of her childhood after traveling all over the world, starting from Stockholm to New York, Paris and Berlin. The North represents the cardinal point from which she initially moved, returning once she honed her artistic maturity, which allowed her to look at the rural, melancholy landscapes of her childhood in a new light.
In Isabella Ståhl’s photos, nature with its vast fields and wild, untamed animals shrouded in fog, which also hides everything else in the landscape like a white blanket, dominates. The extraordinary loneliness of the compositions and the melancholy that enters straight into the viewers’ eyes are two of the main characteristics of the work of Ståhl, an established photographer who has collaborated with some of the most important international brands and publishers during her artistic career. Her ability is not only to be able to build a story behind the moments she chooses to shoot, but also to return like physical sensations of warmth, coldness, and chills that make everyone who stops to look at the photographs a protagonist.

Isabella Ståhl was recently a guest artist in the group exhibition ImageNation in New York, March 10-12, 2023, curated by Martin Vegas.

Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl | Collater.al
Isabella Ståhl has returned to the North
Photography
Isabella Ståhl has returned to the North
Isabella Ståhl has returned to the North
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Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue

Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue

Tommaso Berra · 4 days ago · Photography

One only has to listen to the conversations that arise inside Cecilie Mengel‘s head to imagine how they might be represented photographically. The Danish artist and now resident in New York makes shots that are inner dialogues born from the stimuli she herself receives from her surroundings and the people with whom she experiences very everyday moments.
The result is an artistic production that is marked by a strong variety in subjects and settings, as well as in style, sometimes documentary, other times closer to a certain posed and theatrical photography. They range from shots stolen in the home during a conversation to details of a can of Heinz sauce found in the glove compartment of a cab, all reconstructing a common, everyday story.
Cecilie Mengel’s technique also reflects this same idea of variety. In fact, the artist combines digital and analog photography, in other cases post production adds graphic marks to the images. The lights are sometimes natural other times forcedly created with flash, creating a sense of the whole that is perhaps less homogeneous but rich in personal suggestions and recounts.

Cecilie Mengel was recently a guest artist in the group exhibition ImageNation in New York, March 10-12, 2023 curated by Martin Vegas.

Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel | Collater.al
Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue
Photography
Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue
Cecilie Mengel’s photos are an inner dialogue
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Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya

Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya

Giorgia Massari · 4 days ago · Photography

A delicate, almost transparent and imperceptible veil floats before our eyes and filters reality, which becomes subjective and never absolute. The philosopher Schopenhauer called it “the veil of Maya,” that impediment that prohibits man from experiencing reality, that deludes us into thinking we know Truth. Photographer Diego Dominici places it between the viewer and his subjects, transforming it into the actual protagonist of the Atman and Red Clouds series. The figures – men and women – are trapped in the veil, struggling with it trying to escape, clinging tightly to it, trying to penetrate it; in other cases, instead, they welcome it, lying down and conforming to its persuading softness. The viewer is only allowed to catch a glimpse of the shapes of their naked bodies and their bones imprinted on the surface, in a dance of light and shadow that convey sensuality and loneliness at the same time.

Diego Dominici attempts to break the two-dimensionality of photography, creating two planes of depth: the one dictated by the fabric and its ripples and the one in which the subject is placed. The viewer’s eye is led to move continuously over the surface, trying to overcome it and thus reach the subject and its forms therefore, in other words, the Truth.
The analogy with human psychology is stated by the photographer who wants to “rip apart two-dimensionality to investigate the tangles of human interiority.” As in his shots, human beings can choose to be lulled by the veil of illusion, be caressed by a fictitious reality and stand firm on their point of view, or they can choose to break it, thus reaching the other side and look at reality from another perspective. The fabric, or rather the veil, becomes the emblem of relational barriers, those obstacles that come between us and others, which prevent us from understanding the motives of others and create unbridgeable distances. At the same time, the veil becomes part of us, a kind of wrapping that envelops and shapes us, preventing us from going beyond it. But, as Schopenhauer said, the veil of Maya must be torn down, ripped open like a Fountain’s canvas, human must shed the envelope like a snake changing its skin, in order to open up to the other. After all, what is love if not “the cancellation of the ego, the collapse of all conscious discrimination and the renunciation of all methodical choice?” said Salvador Dali in My Secret Life. Diego Dominici’s works thus invite deep intimate reflection but, thanks to his carefully curated aesthetics, they can also simply satisfy the eye and appear as sensual works, in which the veil becomes a prelude to intimate pleasure.

Diego Dominici | Collater.al
Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya
Photography
Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya
Diego Dominici and the veil of Maya
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6 photos to discover the magic of Rodney Smith

6 photos to discover the magic of Rodney Smith

Tommaso Berra · 1 day ago · Photography

He was first a great teacher, educator and essayist, then also a great photographer, who linked his career to portraiture and later to the world of fashion. Over the course of his career Rodney Smith (1947-2016) depicted meticulously constructed, humorous, paradoxical, romantic and funny scenes, which will now be collected in a volume entitled “Rodney Smith: A Leap of Faith,” containing more than two hundred photographs – some previously unpublished – just acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The project and the Getty acquisition trace a creative trajectory that has made fantasy and elegance a true photographic strand. Viewers are invited to activate a comparison with the Surrealist René Magritte, the painter who comes closest to Rodney Smith in themes and subject matter, as Getty Museum curator Paul Martineau describes Smith: “…like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, his photographs lead us down the rabbit hole to a fantastical place that is just beyond our reach but one intended to inspire us to be better versions of ourselves.

Collater.al has selected six of Rodney Smith’s most beautiful photographs, A Leap of Faith, the impression is that of frames from a fantasy film or scenes from a great costume musical, with the protagonists dancing and kissing over the roof of a yellow New York taxi cab.

Rodney Smith | Collater.al
Figure 1 Twins in the Tree, Snedens Landing, New York, 1999 © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith
Rodney Smith | Collater.al
Plate 41 Self-Portrait with Leslie, Siena, Italy, 1990 © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith
Rodney Smith | Collater.al
Plate 86 A.J. Chasing Airplane, Orange County Airport, New York, 1998 © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith
Rodney Smith | Collater.al
Plate 110 Reed Leaping Over Rooftop, New York, New York, 2007 © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith
Rodney Smith | Collater.al
Plate 115 Wessel Looking Over the Balcony, Paris, France, 2007 © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith
Rodney Smith | Collater.al
Plate 126 Edythe and Andrew Kissing on Top of Taxis, New York, New York, 2008 © 2023 Rodney Smith Ltd., courtesy of the Estate of Rodney Smith
6 photos to discover the magic of Rodney Smith
Photography
6 photos to discover the magic of Rodney Smith
6 photos to discover the magic of Rodney Smith
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