Ronit Porat: Night Wood
Curator: Ron Bartos
Assistant curator: Dr. Lia Moran Gilad
The Negev Museum of Art is proud to present the exhibition Ronit Porat: Night Wood. Ronit Porat is a multidisciplinary artist who specializes in photographic collages, juxtaposing photos with archival, historical, artistic, and biographical materials that she extracts from their original context and sets in new ones. She applies the same practice to the exhibition before us, following a stream of consciousness that emanates from two separate springs. The first is the sculpture The Amazon (1915) by Chana Orloff (1888–1968) – an eminent sculptor and one of the central figures of the School of Paris. Orloff formulated a modernist language that infused avant-garde formal simplification with human warmth, and focused on the human figure, particularly women – artists and intellectuals whose portraits became representations of a new, modern femininity. The Amazon, which references the ancient myth of female warriors who lived outside male-dominated society, symbolized modern and independent femininity in the present tense and hinted at a deep kinship between women, manifested in shared inspiration and strength, like the sisterhood that formed around Orloff’s studio. The second point of departure, which also inspired the exhibition’s title, is the 1936 book Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1892–1982). A masterpiece of 20th century literary modernism, the provocative book recounts a complicated, tragic, and passionate relationship between two women, set against the backdrop of love and loneliness in Paris’s dark nightlife between the two World Wars.
Porat’s Night Wood came about through the confluence of these two sources of inspiration. The artist turned to the visual raw materials – photographs, reproductions of sculptures, scans of art books and magazines of their period – and created (digital) collages in an act of crossbreeding images into hybrid photographs. And so, effectively this is not about creating something out of nothing, but rather about creating something out of something, which entails involvement and affinity. In a way, the raw materials allow Porat to take part in the culture of other times and places: She visits Orloff’s studio, immerses herself in the social circle that has formed around it, and intertwines her artistic language into the artistic languages of those artists. And so, alongside the longing for Paris as a tumultuous and alluring cultural center, Porat’s works also take on another dimension: The collagist deconstruction and fragmentation respond to the instability that prevailed in Europe, to the rifts that began to emerge in that reality, on the verge of the great catastrophe.
Ronit Porat (b. 1975, Kfar Giladi) holds a BA in Photography and Digital Media from Hadassah College in Jerusalem and an MFA from the Chelsea School of Art and Design in London. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in Israel and internationally and has won her the Artistic Encouragement Prize by the Ministry of Culture (2013) and The Lauren and Mitchell Presser Photography Award for a Young Israeli Artist from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2017), among others.
