is synchronized with the hour of the day and the season of the year.
The video artwork ‘Ways’ constitutes a meaningful contribution to the sense of time in the exhibition. Projected on the large wall above the staircase of the column hallway the film ‘moves’ the exhibition space. Focusing downwards, the lens of the camera captures urban walking, as it follows the passages between sidewalks, roads, pedestrian crossings and staircases.
The artist’s steps change according to the angle of the sun, hinting at the time of the day. Linchevsky’s ‘Ways’ invites the viewers to an imaginary walk taking place in the actual staircase of the museum.
The video artwork ‘Wind in the Garden’ is showing in the museum’s cafeteria, an intermediate space linking the galleries to the courtyard. What at first glance seems to be part of the décor proves to be a work requiring continuous contemplation.
The film shows the wind blowing through the leaves of the chain of hearts plant, a trailing succulent climbing up the courtyard wall. Over the years this rosary vine has become an integral part of the museum’s courtyard, representing its very core.
The starting point of the work ‘Wind in the Garden’ is the relationship between inside and outside. It is an attempt to invite the outside in and to reveal how the exterior space reverberates on the inside. While exploring moments in the garden, I noticed the movement of the plant in the wind. This work tracks the natural and temporal transformations, as they are perceived through the museum’s courtyard. [7.11.2015]
What started out as a local experiment turned out to be an ongoing process confirming the permanence of the caption ‘time passes’, which is engraved on the studio wall. Linchevsky chose to engrave this caption in a brisk manual movement on the wall of the museum’s sculpture courtyard next to the inscriptions left by its founders.
Passing time is lasting.
Yaniv Shapira
The exhibition ‘Drawing Time’ showing at the Museum of Art Ein Harod is inspired by the museum’s architectural qualities, adding another layer to Linchevsky’s works: exploring its natural light, the scale of the exhibition’s spaces and the relation between inside and outside.
When contemplating Samuel Bickel’s architecture of light, I am reminded of my first creative years. The homogenous light and silence reigning in the museum’s galleries, especially in the courtyard hallway, remind me of the wicker shelters that I built alongside uncultivated fields under the beating sun in the 1970s. There, time and the awareness of transience and impermanence were imprinted into my artistic DNA. I find all these aspects in the abundance of times offered by Samuel Bickel’s architecture. The exhibition ‘Drawing Time’ is an attempt to reveal hidden, changing, time as it resounds through the museum’s halls and courtyards. [5.4.2016]
During the past year Linchevsky’s regular museum visits were dedicated to the study of the variations of the daylight and its shadows according to the changing seasons. The resulting impressions are expressed in the installations at the center of the museum’s column hallway. This hall with its linear walking axis, semi-open exhibition space and columns adjacent to the walls, constitutes an architectural riddle: When we walk through the column hall, the works can only be gradually seen. Against the symmetric arrangement of the column hallway the windows along the walls connect between inside and outside: Along the south wall opening up to the sky, and the north wall facing the courtyard, a trailing succulent wraps its foliage around the building. The leaves of the chain of hearts plant echo the seasonal changes.
Displayed between the columns, the works from the series ‘Time Passes’ and ‘Google Earth’ create parallel universes through axes that are both linear and circular, high and low, and at the same time horizontal and vertical. During the day the columns cast shadows on the walls. These variations create a sense of space that
surfaces. Alternating between drawing and painting allowed me to cover and erase canvas surfaces with a residue of color that softened the emptiness. My aim was for the continents to both ‘flow’ on the planet and form an integral part of it. [14/05/2012]
Moreover these works establish a connection between the seismic and geographical expression of ‘place’ and Linchevsky’s permanent interest in bodily mechanisms, such as ‘eyesight’. Situated within a cosmic landscape, the Earth is reminiscent of the pupils featuring in her early work, such as the exhibition ‘Blinking’ [Museum of Art Ein Harod, 2005]. At that time, the motive of the eye came to represent the connecting member between inside and outside, sleep and wakefulness, consciousness and the unconscious. One of the video artworks shows the artist blinking. As her eyes open and shut, her pupils roll to the side as if they were outlining the limit of the field of vision.
The floating planets inspire us to track borders, continents and regions. These topographic expressions led Linchevsky to explore similar artistic representations such as ‘36 Views of Mount Fuji’ by Hukosai. These served as a source of inspiration for variations of drawings of ‘Mount Kilimanjaro’. Mount Fuji in Asia and Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa represent the Syrian-African rift that is referred to in the drawings ‘Between Poles’: In these dark canvasses the outlines of the mountain are revealed through the dusk. Negotiating the distance between near and far, the mountain seems tangible and unreachable at the same time.
I combine different languages of drawing and painting: Flat, abstract, figurative, thin, thick, the memory of a place and its description. Somehow they don’t fit together. The result is an accumulation, as if I had to choose a single language, yet didn’t choose one. There is no integration. This lack of unity is perhaps what defines Mount Kilimanjaro. [30.12.2013]
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Noga Linchevsky’s exhibition addresses different dimensions of time – the moment, eternity, time passing, measured and standing still. Linchevsky’s attempt to ‘capture time’ in its materiality took a turn in 2007, when she started following the movement of the sunrays shining through the window of her studio every day. The light spot created a clockwise movement on the wall during the day that faded away at night. In response to this daily appearance, she applied spackle to the corner of the wall, which she engraved with the words ‘time passes’. This ongoing act of documentation is revealed through different means such as photography, engraving and drawing on canvas.
In the works on view in this exhibition, Linchevsky weaves psychological, physical and geographical landscapes into a unified artistic language. Oscillating between graphic and verbal aspects of language [text drawing] the series of drawings ‘Time Passes’ is closely linked to the conceptual art in which Linchevsky evolved. Beyond her exploration of mere visual or narrative images, she aims for meditative ‘activity drawings’ bearing witness to internal frequencies such as heartbeats, inhaling and exhaling. This approach is also at the origin of the difference between the works: The word combination ‘time passes’ appears from right to left and from top to bottom in both dense and scattered sequences in various sizes and intensity.
The ‘Google Earth’ series started taking shape in 2012. It is composed of earth balls appearing in either light or dark shades, as they emerge from a confrontation between drawing and painting, between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, negotiating the distance between near and far. In her work diary Linchevsky referred to them as follows:
At a certain stage I was intrigued by “the holes’’ appearing on planet Earth. Seemingly untouched and untreated, they awakened a sense of softness, yet they compromised wholeness in creating a tension between being and the void, between the sea and the continent, materiality and empty
נגה לינצ׳בסקי לרשום את הזמן תערוכה במשכן לאמנות, עין חרוד, אוקטובר 2016 /
[email protected]
נגה לינצ׳בסקי קורות חיים
אוצר: יניב שפירא; שימור, הפקת העבודה בגן, תליית עבודות: מור טבנקין; הפקת הוידאו והתערוכה: לילך סמילנסקי;
עזרה בביצוע עבודה בגן: אחמד ג׳ומייד; תליית עבודות: יהודית בז׳רנו; עזרה בתלייה: נילי הלר; צילום: רן ארדה;
צילום וידאו רוח בגן, time passes: איתי כרם; כתוביות: אילה אופנהיימר; תרגום לאנגלית: רחל פרליבטר; עיצוב והפקת הקטלוג: משה מירסקי
הקטלוג הופק בתמיכת קרן ותיקי אם המושבות
Noga Linchevsky / Drawing time exhibition at the Mishkan Museum of Art Ein, Harod, October 2016 / [email protected] Noga Linchevsky Biographical Notes
Exhibition Curator: Yaniv Shapira; Exhibition and Video Producer: lilach Smilansky; Conservation, Garden exhibit Production, Hanging: Mor Tabenkin
Assistant to the garden exhibit production : Ahmad Jumayed; Hanging: Yudith Bejerano; Assistant to the hanging: Nili Heller; Titles: Ayala Oppenheimer
;Photography: Ran Erde; Video Photography Wind in the Garden, Time passes: Itai Kerem;English translation: Rachel Verliebter Design and Production: Moshe Mirsky
The Catalogue is Published with the support of Em Hamoshavot Veterans Foundation