STUX Gallery is pleased to present Phantom Landscapes, the premiere solo exhibition of the Israeli based multimedia artist Peny Hes Yassour. In this timely series of drawings and rubber-like sculpture, Yassour relates to the long tradition of landscape representations in Israeli art, tying together such collective elements as origins, aspirations and cultural and political identity.
Yassour’s drawings represent for her a physical spatiality situated within a continuously shifting present. The elusive Israeli landscape has always contained elements of camouflage, not only in the physical and practical sense as employed by the army, but also in the geo- political sense, blurring distinctions between “real phenomena” and its cover. These immaculate drawings hover in a state of anxiety somewhere between imminent loss and incomparable beauty and desire.
The net works, cast from a rubber-like material of the artist’s own making, are derived from the drawings to create a new entity, a hybrid of sculpture and drawing in space. The works function as part of a questioning process, eliminating or condensing spatial depth to create a new language, or rather different dialects, relating to sculpture. Like the landscape drawings, the nets disappear and re-appear, hide and conceal. In looking through them, the shadows they produce continue the drawing process, shifting and continuous; they exist as a nomadic sight.
Yassour’s lyrical invocation of the landscape as a temporal political entity places her in the context of such lauded international artists as Michal Rovner, Robert Smithson, Ghada Amer, Sigalit Landau and Walter De Maria, to name but a few.