Dafna Talmor’s second solo exhibition at Sid Motion Gallery, The Moving Eye Cannot See, builds upon her ongoing Constructed Landscapes series. It showcases two newly produced bodies of work that extend the artist’s interest in fragmentation, abstraction, hybridity and reconfiguration. More broadly, Talmor’s practice explores shifting conceptions of landscape and perspective and mechanisms of image construction and production.
The exhibition opens with an image of a set of islands, originally framed by the balcony windows of the domestic space Talmor stayed in during a private commission she undertook in 2022. Documented at various times of day from multiple angles, slivers of collaged negatives in stacked form seek to capture the complexity and vastness of the landscape in all its hues and variable weather. This new work, like all work in Talmor’s Constructed Landscapes series, is driven by the impossibility of conveying what the naked eye scans expansively when encountering a landscape. By reconfiguring her negatives, Talmor conflates multiple views and temporalities, alluding to the enormity of an all-encompassing first-hand experience of a landscape.
Beyond abstracted representations of landscapes, the commissioned work mirrors proportions of windows that contain spectacular views. Architectural and mathematical details generally rendered inconsequential, become integral to the way the work is literally formed and shaped. These relational decisions are extended further throughout the exhibition bridging time and space both within and beyond the frame. One set of framed work informs the dimensions of the next in a chain of interconnectedness and internalised systems of logic.
Extending the dialogue with architecture, the exhibition includes a multi-panelled site-specific photographic sculpture made in reference to the window panes of the main gallery space. In this case, proportions are relative to the dimensions of the 5×4 enlarger Talmor uses in her London darkroom. Photography has often – and problematically – been described as a window to the world. The window as a portal or a metaphor for another dimension, that frames or limits the view, seems more fitting here.
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