Po'elet (Woman Worker)

 

A site-specific installation that filled the entire space of the Art Lab, Tel Aviv, Becoming part of my experimental process over five weeks. During this time, I operated on the axis between being a “production-line worker” and an “artist,” attempting to examine the relationship between an output-oriented worker whose labor is intended to produce a functional object, and between the act of searching. The search, art making, successes and failures are all part of the artist’s work in the studio. An anonymous Art Deco illustration was the source of the artwork that developed out of the process, spreading out to fill the entire space, walls, and floor. The installation comprised about 1,000 dusting brushes which I produced one by one as a regular production line worker in the Kibbutz Ruhama industrial brush factory. I introduced a varied, unique color mixture in each brush, comprised of fibers from the three basic colors of red, blue, and yellow. The installation engages in expressions of beauty through links to Art Nouveau, socialism, labor, and Sisyphean work, as well as to the overt and covert.

 

Installation view (detail) 2022.
Site-specific, ongoing movable installation, dimensions variable (Day 27),
Dust brushes, road cleaning brushes. The Lab – Art Space,
Curator: Sharon Toval