Michal Alpern:
Valentine

Michal Alpern's exhibition "Valentine" includes works from recent years, created using silicone and other flexible materials, alongside works made of stone. Silicone is used in the film industry for props and special effects, but it is also used for prostheses that extend the body. By contrast, stone is a traditional material for sculpture. Alpern's material research reveals and illuminates in materials their pictorial and sculptural properties – fluidity, shine, staininess, monochromatics and more.

An essential principle of the artist's work is the formation of one work out of another. Most of the works in the exhibition began with a clear image (table, torso, half-eaten pear, flower), that has gradually become abstracted and veiled with every visual expression of it and is now presented to us in its current incarnation. The search for the this image is futile. But the reuse and the meaning that ebbs and flows are essential and fundamental principles to Alpern’s work, ethics and ecology.

In fact, the mythical figure (and idea) that has been present in the development of the exhibition is that of Echo, the mountain nymph whose story is intertwined in Roman mythology with that of Narcissus. According to Ovid, the chatty and talented Echo was punished by Hera, who decreed that she would give her voice only to the words of another (that is, to serve as an echo, hence her name). Following her infatuation with Narcissus, who of course does not return her love, Echo dies of sorrow, her body shrinks and disappears and only her voice remains. In the Greek version of the story, it is the god Pan who punishes Echo for not responding to his courtship, and while her body is dismembered and scattered, her voice is condemned to live forever as an echo in the mountains.

Like Echo's story, Alpern's exhibition also involves space, landscape, body, and object in a way that blurs their boundaries and differences. The artist's actions, materials, and creative process come together in the image of the continuously withering Echo, in a story of unrequited love and unanswered emotion.

Alpern choice of Echo as a driving force is a conscious act of her preferring her over Narcissus, who is much more common in art and is often used as a metaphor for art and representation in general. It is also a choice of the feminine and identity that is formed through the Other, and which seems completely drained and dependent on him/her. But Alpern's echo is present here as a disruption of the common perception of the self and its distinction from the Other. Here, the voice that remains unanswered is an infinite creative mechanism that forever confronts the person with him/herself.

 

“From Below, as a Neighbor” by Lydia Davis

If I were not me and overheard me from below, as a neighbor, talking to him, I would say to myself how glad I was not to be her, not to be sounding the way she is sounding, with a voice like her voice and an opinion like her opinion. But I cannot hear myself from below, as a neighbor, I cannot hear how I ought not to sound, I cannot be glad I am not her, as I would be if I could hear her. Then again, since I am her, I am not sorry to be here, up above, where I cannot hear her as a neighbor, where I cannot say to myself, as I would have to from below, how glad I am not to be her.

 

Michal Alpern (b. 1986, Haifa, lives and works in New York and Tel Aviv) is a sculpture and installation artist. Her works have been exhibited in museums and art institutions in Israel and abroad, including the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art, the Ashdod Museum of Art, the Wallach Gallery, the Fals Flag Gallery and the M23 Projects Gallery in New York. Alpern holds an MFA in sculpture from the University of Colombia, New York, and a bachelor's degree in art from the Bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem.