TAL AMITAI-LAVI

Tal Amitai-Lavi addresses the domestic sphere, operating as a shaman attempting to "rectify" and "rehabilitate" crumbling house skeletons hanging by a thread. Her archive contains a collection of house remains that collapsed due to natural catastrophes or wars, which she collects from websites. Amitai-Lavi moves along a dissonant axis of deconstruction and construction, putting together an entire unit from a shattered, crumbled image and/or deconstructing the structural unit into various parts. It is a bidirectional route that may be read both ways.
In the work "Katrina", she "inscribes" an architectural image of a house in New Orleans crushed by Hurricane Katrina with black sewing thread, via an obsessive, industrious act. She processes the image and constructs it line by line from strips of fine thread attached to a transparent Plexiglas surface. Amitai-Lavi exposes the artistic manipulation by leaving unstitched threads on the surface. The demanding, intimate labor spawns an enigmatic space infused with life, where the memory of the house that was, with the totality of its physical and metaphorical strata, is at once present and absent.