Ayelet Carmi

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.