Anna Shteynshleyger
25 May - 28 Aug 2010
ANNA SHTEYNSHLEYGER
May 25th, 2010 - August 28th, 2010
“One needs only look at Schelling’s coat it enters almost unnoticed into immortality; the forms which it assumes on its wearer are not unworthy of the folds in his face.”
-Walter Bejamin “A Short History of Photography”
This is the artist's first solo show in Israel.
The exhibition presents photographs from Anna Shteynshleyger's series titled "City of Destiny". Photographed between 2004-2009, named for the slogan appearing on a municipal sign in Des Plaines Illinois, a nondescript suburb outside of Chicago where the artist lived, the series documents the artist's life over the past several years. During this period while renegotiating a relationship to Orthodox Judaism, the camera served as a marker of moments between ritual time and lived time, refusing traditional modes of photographic experience and recollection they do not easily lend themselves to Benjamin’s categories of Erlebnis or Erfahrung. The heightened acute shock of experience or the prolonged accumulated experience referenced in these photographs are neither allegorical nor metaphorical, but rather give way to the tautegorical, a term adopted by Gershom Scholem from Schelling, where the religious symbol is not to be understood in terms of an external system of reference outside itself, but rather the symbol carries its own meaning in reference to itself. The images in the series skew reduction to the component genres of landscape, portrait, still life and interior. Instead, the individual tableaux offer a dreamlike series that emerge as would a single long exposure. The transgression of the graven image ensures the secondary transgression of not being wholly in and of the lived moment, present-less, in the process of appearing and receding like a ghost.
Anna Shteynshleyger Grew up in Moscow and emigrated to the United States in 1992. She received her MFA from Yale in 2001 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. She recently had a major solo exhibition in the Renaissance Society, Chicago. This is the artist's first solo show in Israel.
Selected exhibitions:
Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2010)
Di Goldene Keyt, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel (2010)
A Selection of Recent Portrait Photographs from the Collection of The Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2010)
Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, NY (2005)
Museum of Contemporary Art (12x12), Chicago (2004)
May 25th, 2010 - August 28th, 2010
“One needs only look at Schelling’s coat it enters almost unnoticed into immortality; the forms which it assumes on its wearer are not unworthy of the folds in his face.”
-Walter Bejamin “A Short History of Photography”
This is the artist's first solo show in Israel.
The exhibition presents photographs from Anna Shteynshleyger's series titled "City of Destiny". Photographed between 2004-2009, named for the slogan appearing on a municipal sign in Des Plaines Illinois, a nondescript suburb outside of Chicago where the artist lived, the series documents the artist's life over the past several years. During this period while renegotiating a relationship to Orthodox Judaism, the camera served as a marker of moments between ritual time and lived time, refusing traditional modes of photographic experience and recollection they do not easily lend themselves to Benjamin’s categories of Erlebnis or Erfahrung. The heightened acute shock of experience or the prolonged accumulated experience referenced in these photographs are neither allegorical nor metaphorical, but rather give way to the tautegorical, a term adopted by Gershom Scholem from Schelling, where the religious symbol is not to be understood in terms of an external system of reference outside itself, but rather the symbol carries its own meaning in reference to itself. The images in the series skew reduction to the component genres of landscape, portrait, still life and interior. Instead, the individual tableaux offer a dreamlike series that emerge as would a single long exposure. The transgression of the graven image ensures the secondary transgression of not being wholly in and of the lived moment, present-less, in the process of appearing and receding like a ghost.
Anna Shteynshleyger Grew up in Moscow and emigrated to the United States in 1992. She received her MFA from Yale in 2001 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. She recently had a major solo exhibition in the Renaissance Society, Chicago. This is the artist's first solo show in Israel.
Selected exhibitions:
Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2010)
Di Goldene Keyt, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel (2010)
A Selection of Recent Portrait Photographs from the Collection of The Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2010)
Moti Hasson Gallery, New York, NY (2005)
Museum of Contemporary Art (12x12), Chicago (2004)