The artist collective I am part of has kept me pretty busy during the last couple of weeks. We cooperated with Jerusalem’s Train Theatre, donated our time for a charity in Jerusalem’s first Cooking Pot Festival, and in between managed to launch the first issue of our art magazine.
The issue, titled ‘No one will admit to it‘ is a mixture of our art works, including poems, short stories, paintings, drawings, photographs and digital art. It features a number of my photo collages and a few Hebrew poems I wrote this year.
At this time you can purchase a copy wherever we perform, but we are working on additional ways of distribution including selected Jerusalem bookshops and making online purchasing available both for hard copies and soft copies.
After two gruelling days working an assembly line like photography studio, I have found renewed faith in the photography of children. Trying to avoid kitsch as much as possible, I worried our cooperation with Jerusalem’s Train Theatre might prove to be void of artistic merit, but boy was I wrong. Yes, many of the photos were nothing more than Jewish kids in Purim costumes smiling for mommy – but from time to time, when not pressed to fake-smile, something much deeper and profound emerged.
Following is the photo I liked most out of these two days of work. My friend Guy hinted that I might like this photo because on a subconscious level it reminds me of photographer Cindy Sherman’s work. What do you think?
It’s the Jewish holiday of Purim, and Hagigit, the artists collective I am part of, cooperated with Jerusalem’s Train Theatre for a Purim Spiel celebration for kids. The events started with a show called ‘Gulliver – The Journey to Lilliput’ by Amit Drori, based on the classic book by Jonathan Swift – and continued with us. We designed and erected a photography studio to correlate with Swift’s ideas of big and small, allowing the audience to experience being as tall as buildings or feel tinier than usual. We photographed the costumed kids and using our lean mean printing machines granted them a moment frozen in time.
Here’s a small selection of the photos taken today:
Hagigit, the artists collective I co-founded, was invited to participate in the End of Summer events by the Jerusalem Theatre. We spent the last few weeks in preparation for the three day event, our biggest event to date both logistically and in terms of crowd participation. We set up our famous outdoors studio, packed it with theatre-related props, set up a work station consisting of 6 laptop computers, 2 photo printers, a wireless router, and one strategically placed electric fan.
The whole shebang worked like so: people could play dress up and don outrageous costumes, three Hagigit members staged the studio scenes and photographed them, another member was in charge of downloading the photos and distributing them using our wireless network. Most of the photos were instantly printed by another member, and a few were manipulated using Photoshop by two other Hagigit members.
Myself? I was in charge of hooking up to the jumbotron, displaying the photos taken and playing the Photoshop screen-captures, to the amusement of the crowd.
Here is a short movie consisting of photos taken at the studio:
And here is an example of the sort of Photoshop work that was done in real time, played here at 8 times the original speed:
