What Grows Despite | Group Exhibition
Dana Cohen, Tana Gaxiola, Uri Kloss
Curated by Ariel Rom Cohen
In the exhibition What Grows Despite three artistic voices: Dana Cohen, Uri Kloss and Tana Gaxiola, come together to address nature not as a romantic or neutral space but as a site of constant tension between life and control. Through textile, painting, and landscape the artists offer different perspectives on how nature exists within systems of displacement, fencing, framing, and the human gaze. Despite these forces nature retains a stubborn quality of movement and growth though one that is deeply affected by the systems surrounding it. The works in the exhibition examine situations in which nature does not disappear but instead changes form, infiltrates spaces not intended for it, or seeks renewed grounding within a reality of fragmentation.
Dana Cohen (b. 1992) is a textile artist whose practice engages with sustainability and the complex relationship between humanity and nature focusing on the social and environmental phenomena that characterize the Anthropocene era. As the daughter of a farmer, Cohen has witnessed the ways in which polluting industries led by fast fashion push green spaces and entire ecosystems to the margins. Her hybrid background with a BFA in Fashion Design from Shenkar and an MFA in Fine Arts from Bezalel is evident in a practice that combines material experimentation recycling and critical thinking. Cohen gives old garments a new life cycle by shredding unraveling and processing recycled textiles into fibers from which artworks are created. The exhibition presents a large scale installation resembling a living organism composed of agricultural netting sourced from her father’s greenhouse onto which recycled textiles in various colors are woven. The installation takes over the center of the gallery space and is visible from the street with smaller scale echoes appearing in other areas of the gallery emphasizing its presence as a living body seeking to spread, infiltrate and establish itself. The whole is unraveled and reassembled the boundary between outside and inside becomes blurred and the work dismantles hierarchies in search of an independent foothold within the gallery’s white and controlled space.
Tana Gaxiola (b. 1979) is a Mexican artist specializing in murals and canvases depicting vibrant vegetation. Her work is grounded in prolonged observation of photographs of birds flowers and natural landscapes from which she draws inspiration for rich compositions. A graduate of the Complutense University in Madrid, Gaxiola describes a deep attraction to nature and its movement and a desire to capture it and transform it into her own personal universe. Her paintings convey power and dynamism through rhythmic brushstrokes an abundance of forms bold use of color and textures that generate visual vibrations. The works offer a view of nature that is not restrained or subdued but eruptive optimistic and filled with positive energy. Her non Israeli perspective introduces a sense of abundance colorfulness and faith in the vitality of life offering an emotional and aesthetic alternative to narratives of restriction and limitation.
Uri Kloss (b. 1993) focuses his practice primarily on the space of the kibbutz in which he lives – Kibbutz Hasolelim, through which he examines questions of belonging, identity and territoriality. His work moves between painting, drawing, sculpture and installation and in this exhibition his works concentrate on depictions of marginal objects and landscapes that often escape prolonged attention such as roadside plants, and fences. Kloss selects images that are both charged but also images of the day to day scenes, freezing marginal moments in an effort to preserve them. The realistic and static quality of his paintings creates a dissonance between nature as a living space and a sense of stillness and quiet. For Kloss, the kibbutz resonates with broader processes in Israeli society including globalization, privatization and the dismantling of traditional structures. Painting becomes a site in which culture and nature are locked in constant struggle: bars against plant, or a mediated gaze that distances the viewer from nature.
Together, the works in the exhibition form a complex view of nature perpetually poised on a threshold between freedom and confinement, optimism and darkness, wildness and domestication. Through an invasive textile organism a frozen and framed painting and vegetation bursting with color a picture emerges of nature that does not surrender to the conditions imposed upon it. A growth that occurs despite everything and continues to redefine our relationship with the environment in which we live.
