Artist-in-Residence
Ayelet Carmi
July-September 2026
“I am eagerly looking forward to the opportunity to create my art from a distance, precisely because my work is deeply connected to Israel and to my experiences as a woman and as an Israeli. In my experience, taking a break and viewing things that engage me from afar—both in terms of place and language—always stimulates creativity and thought. I am waiting for a kind of distance that will allow me to re-examine my perspective on my artistic practice. Since the past two years in Israel have been very challenging, and I still feel under a cloud, now, more than ever, I would like to breathe different air. In addition, I would love to be inspired by the artists and art in Los Angeles, to wander, to get to know people and places, and to breathe in a different culture and atmosphere. Perhaps this will also open up new opportunities and collaborations for me.”
-Ayelet Carmi,
Chapter 2 2026 Air
Artist Statement:
Focusing on circles of my identity: woman, painter, and Israeli in a volatile reality, I operate on the seam between painting, installation, and assemblage. I strive to break through the pictorial frame and shift the medium toward a transitory existence on the brink of disintegration. Female figures drawn from mythology predominate, alongside motifs from local history and the Zionist-utopian narrative, resulting in hybrids in a private mythology with collective resonance. Having grown up on a kibbutz, I am interested in the dream- encounters-reality aspect of Israeli identity. Kibbutz dialectic, doomed to failure, provides poetic inspiration embodied in the female figures.
Since 2014, I have been collaborating with multidisciplinary artist Merav Heyman. Our joint projects unite our artistic languages and generate something new from the meeting of disciplines. The shared content, relating to the female body and to real and imagined local history, borders on absurdity, idealism, mythic vision, beauty, and failure.
