Naomi Safran-Hon: House Without Home Laura Amussen and J. Susan Isaacs, Ph.D.
THE SILBER ART GALLERY Sanford J. Ungar Athenaeum | Goucher College
ISBN: 978-1-329-91476-6 The Silber Art Gallery, Goucher College Towson, Maryland 2016 Copyright ©Goucher College Galleries Design: Ayumi Yasuda Images courtesy of Slag Gallery, Brooklyn, NY Cover: Wadi Salib: Double Doors, 2014 archival ink jet print, lace, pigment, acrylic, and cement on canvas and fabric 42” x 72”
Naomi Safran-Hon: House Without Home
Laura Amussen and J. Susan Isaacs, Ph.D.
THE SILBER ART GALLERY Sanford J. Ungar Athenaeum | Goucher College
Wadi Salib: Glitter and Doom in Gold, 2014 archival ink jet print, lace, pigment, acrylic, oil pastels, and cement on canvas and fabric 72� x 110�
In Context Naomi Safran-Hon grew up in Haifa, Israel, and her work is greatly influenced by this.1 Israel is a land of contradictions, where the present is built upon the past. This relationship between the contemporary and ancient worlds can be found across the country in many ways, from the industry in the Negev, to the tourism of Masada. It is also apparent in many quieter expressions, like the changing presence of the people in the land. Through experiencing the architectural echoes of the past, Safran-Hon creates images that share a universal aesthetic language that demonstrates a profound understanding of how architecture can symbolize the human relationship to home. It is important to recognize that Safran-Hon’s works act as metaphors for loss and emptiness. At the same time, they are exquisitely constructed compositions, and their beauty and elegance suggest a sense of hope as well. Safran-Hon creates collages whose formal elements are intricately linked to allegorical content. These works do stand separately from their initial inspiration and can be appreciated out of time and place, but knowing something about their context provides another avenue for appreciation.
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For those unaware of the underlying setting of much of her work, it is the former Arab Muslim and Christian, and later Mizrahi Jewish neighborhood of Wadi Salib (Valley of the Cross), an area located in the heart of downtown Haifa, Israel, on the lower northeastern slope of Mount Carmel. Haifa is itself a city of contrasts, combining ancient buildings with modern, tall, glass, commercial structures. Many of the streets are narrow and crooked, winding up and down the mountain, resonances of the older city with strong Arab ties that existed before the modern state of Israel. From the top of Mount Carmel, the city and Mediterranean can be seen below. The quality of light is specific to this part of the world, and the buildings appear as sparkling jewels set against a blue sea and sky. Safran-Hon photographed the old stone houses of 18th-century Wadi Salib, which today stand empty. The contrast between darkened interiors and bright exteriors is captured in abstracted form in her works, which she created by combining layers of materials—photographs, cement, and lace fabric—to echo the emptiness and memories of the buildings. The artist attempts to produce a new narrative for Wadi Salib.2 The abandoned homes’ hollowness symbolizes a history of the town—from a thriving Arab population forced to leave, to an impoverished Jewish neighborhood composed largely of Jews from Morocco, to the abandoned buildings of today. By the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, 65,000 Arabs fled the city of Haifa, including the Muslim Arabs of Wadi Salib. Few were permitted to return to the city, though the Arab name for the neighborhood remained. From May 1948 to March 1949, a mixture of Holocaust survivors and Mizrahi immigrants (Jews from the neighboring Arab countries who left due to decolonization and changing policies toward Jews—in this case, from Morocco) were placed in Wadi Salib. In July 1959, there were riots to protest the police for killing a Mizrahi resident of the town and to complain about the poor living conditions and the perceived social and political oppression of its Jewish residents from Arab lands by the authorities and the local Ashkenazi European Jews. The neighborhood remains standing,
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Wadi Salib (from memory): Blue Window with shades, 2014 pigment, lace, cement, and fabric 48” x 60”
but similar to a number of other former Arab villages and towns, the status of property—once owned by Arabs—is now unclear, legally entitled “absentees property,” making development problematic.3 Safran-Hon’s works do not literally tell this story. Instead, the photographs are simply a starting point, with the works going through many iterations and, in the end, emerging only as echoes of the original spaces captured by the camera. It is this abstracted outcome that is so compelling and much more powerful than if these images had remained as simple narratives. Safran-Hon brings the specificity of Wadi Salib to the more global context of the symbolic relationship between human beings and architecture, and between people and their homes—no matter the geographic location. J. Susan Isaacs, Ph.D. Professor of Art History and Curator of the Holtzman MFA and Center for the Arts galleries at Towson University
1 This essay is an expansion on an essay for a broader exhibition of Israeli art that contained the work of the artist. J. Susan Isaacs, “People in the Land,” catalog essay in Visions of Place: Complex Geographies in Contemporary Israeli Art (Camden: Rutgers Center for the Arts, 2015), 22-29. 2 Kelly Canon, “Naomi Safran-Hon: Rebuilding History,” Dimensions Art Journal, 6 (2010): 20-25.
Wadi Salib: Mirror Bed, 2014 archival ink jet print, lace, and cement on fabric and canvas 42” x 72”
3 See: Yfaat Weiss, A Confiscated Memory: Wadi Salib and Haifa’s Lost Heritage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; Mark Tessler, “The Palestinian Disaster and Basic Issues after 1948” in A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 2nd ed., Indiana University Press, 273-335; and Shanee Shiloh, “Exorcising the Curse of Wadi Salib: Renovating the Abandoned Haifa Neighborhood Will Be a Steep Challenge for Developers,” Haaretz, April 2, 2012. http://www.haaretz.com/business/the-marker-passover-magazine-2012/ exorcising-the-curse-of-wadi-salib-1.422195
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Wadi Salib: Double Doors, 2014 archival ink jet print, lace, pigment, acrylic, and cement on canvas and fabric 42� x 72�
Wadi Salib: Home with 4 Windows and a Door (Kanafani’s house on Bourj Street), 2015 archival ink jet print, lace, pigment, acrylic, and cement on canvas 42” x 84”
Wadi Salib: Home with 4 Windows and a Door (Kanafani’s house on Bourj Street), 2015 (detail) archival ink jet print, lace, pigment, acrylic, and cement on canvas 42” x 84”
NEGATIVE of Wadi Salib: Home with 4 Windows and a Door (Kanafani’s house on Bourj Street), 2015 pencil on paper 48” x 88”
Cement and Lace: Materiality in the Works of Naomi Safran-Hon
A Window With A View: Wall, 2013 lace and cement on fabric 48” x 48”
Process and content are inextricably linked in the works of Naomi SafranHon. She begins by photographing the interiors of abandoned buildings in Wadi Salib, a neighborhood in the heart of downtown Haifa, Israel, where Safran-Hon grew up. Images of dilapidated architectural structures are wrought with layers of peeling paint and crumbling plaster. Exposed wooden beams, iron rods, and cement blocks share the space with mounds of rubble that are littered with domestic detritus left behind by former inhabitants. Doors, boarded-up windows, and arching passageways perform as symbols of entry and privacy, alluding to the interior and the exterior simultaneously—a stark reminder that these walls failed to offer protection from the outside world. Powerful images reveal that home is no longer a haven. Thus, the photos, in and of themselves, speak of loss and absence, devoid of the people displaced by war and conflict who once inhabited these now desolate places. They act as an echo of the past, a metaphor for destruction.
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Once Safran-Hon is satisfied with each photo’s composition, she produces a large-scale archival inkjet print, which is then mounted on canvas. Reacting to the image’s surface, she begins intuitively cutting away small sections of the photo; choices are made as the work progresses, and intricate patterns begin to emerge. The removal of these fragments underscores the notion of eradication. From this point on, Safran-Hon begins to reconstruct the imagery. She literally mends the holes by stretching carefully chosen decorative lace across the back of the canvas. For her, the lace symbolizes the fragile and delicate lives of the people who once inhabited these spaces.1 The type of lace is chosen based on formal qualities, such as color and patterning. Various types interact differently with elements of the photographs, both referencing and highlighting the color palette and patterns found within the images themselves. Safran-Hon pushes cement through the holes in the lace, adding texture. As the cement oozes out of the lace, delicate details both appear and hide. This action implies repair at the most fundamental level. Empty voids are patched and filled, the lace and cement working in tandem; they need each other to function properly, one holding the other. Figuratively speaking, Safran-Hon rebuilds these dilapidated structures through constructive means, as if preserving the former inhabitants’ stories and memories. As a finishing touch, the artist applies paint to select areas of the surface; some areas are abstract and feature texture, pattern, and color, while others display easily recognizable details and objects of domesticity. The contrasts between photo and paint, lace and cement, come together seamlessly, creating paintings that are multi-layered not only in process, but in content. Although the imagery is personal to the artist’s upbringing and experiences, her paintings are open-ended and accessible to all. Safran-Hon’s works are so beautifully crafted it’s easy to overlook the layers of process involved in their creation. Artists’ studio practice is what fuels their creativity; it’s only by working through a variety of permutations and iterations that they are inspired to make their next work. It makes sense then that Safran-Hon began making large-scale pencil drawings
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Wadi Salib: Yellow Wall, 2013 archival ink jet print, lace, cement, and ink on canvas and fabric 60.5” x 78.5”
that mirror the original works. Before adding lace and cement to the back of the canvas, she lays it down on the floor and carefully traces all of the holes she has cut out. While still retaining a sense of depth and place, mapping these negative or missing pieces distills the imagery to simple, line drawings of graphite on white paper. Through this process, the emptiness in the images becomes more insistent; they function as a ghostlike duplication of the original. The haunting quality found in all of SafranHon’s works begs viewers to linger, offering a moment of contemplation, whether it be reflecting on their own past and histories or seeking a deeper awareness and understanding of current global concerns.
Laura Amussen, Curator
A Window With A View: Cactus (Black), 2013 lace and cement on fabric 60� x 48�
1 Telephone conversation with Naomi Safran-Hon on Thursday, September 24, 2015.
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Pink Memory in Six Parts, 2015 cement, pigment and foam on fabric and canvas 48� x 64�
Wadi Salib: Blue Room, 2013 acrylic, cement, and ink on fabric 45.5” x 72.5”
Naomi Safran-Hon Naomi Safran-Hon was born in 1984 in Oxford, England, and raised in Haifa, Israel. She received a Bachelor of Arts in studio art and art history, summa cum laude, from Brandeis University and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, where she won the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Fellowship and the Blanksteen Curatorial Fellowship. Safran-Hon is also a Skowhegan Residency alumna. In addition to her show at Goucher College’s Silber Gallery, her work has been widely published and exhibited, with solo exhibitions at the International Museum of Contemporary Culture in New York, Amsterdam’s Brant Gallery, and Slag Gallery in New York, among others. Safran-Hon’s work has also been featured in many group exhibitions, including those at the Kleindenast Gallery in Koln, Germany; the Brooklyn Museum and Momenta Art in Brooklyn; the Queens Museum of Art in Queens; Museum Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa; Stedman Art Gallery in Rutgers-Camden; the Haifa Museum of Art and the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in Israel; and the Center for the Arts Gallery at Towson University. Safran- Hon is represented by Slag Gallery in New York. For more information, visit: http://naomisafranhon.com/home.html
Wadi Salib: Pink Wall V, 2013 cement and marker on fabric 36” x 36”
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Naomi Safran-Hon: House Without Home January 26 – April 3, 2016 (The gallery will be closed Monday, March 14, to Sunday, March 20, during spring break.)
OPENING RECEPTION
Wednesday, February 3, 6-9 p.m.
Artist’s lecture 6-7 p.m. | Artist’s reception 7-9 p.m.
This event is co-sponsored by Goucher College and Towson University, and the co-curators are Laura Amussen, exhibitions director and curator for Goucher College’s Silber and Rosenberg art galleries, and J. Susan Isaacs, professor of art history and curator of the Holtzman MFA and Center for the Arts galleries at Towson University.
THE SILBER GALLERY
Sanford J. Ungar Athenaeum DIRECTIONS
GALLERY HOURS
Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday – Sunday 410-337-6477
The Silber Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.
The exhibit is free and open to the public.
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www.goucher.edu/silber
THE SILBER GALLERY
Sanford J. Ungar Athenaeum