Tal Amitai-Lavi
LandE scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
I personally don’ t think it can, we have all lived different lives and all had different experiences. No one person will have experienced the same life. I think it can be disconnected from a direct experience, but subconsciously all of our experiences influence the creative process. All of my projects have originated from an experience; it could be a conversation or something I have walked past in the street. These experiences trigger thoughts, ideas and help me to inspire a project.
While you have once highlighte the importance of naming your works— for example in Minutes, the number corresponds to how many minutes the body has been in the cremator— sometimes your images rejects an explicit explanatory strategy: they seem to be the tip of the iceberg of what you are really attempting to communicate. How does representation and a tendency towards abstraction on a semantic level find their balance in your work?
I don’ t want the viewer to understand the work immediately. The viewer has to work for the answers, but the images aren’ t abstract, they are all recognizable. I want the viewers to visually enjoy the work at first but then to start the secondary process of considering what they are looking at. I use a range of titles to communicate to nudge the viewers in the right direction. If the photographs are more visually loaded, I tend to give the work a slightly abstract title. In this two-
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