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Selective listening at the center of Ruth Noam’s new exhibition ‘No Storm in Sight’
The initial sensation overwhelming the viewer while discovering the new installation of the Israeli artist Ruth Noam is the order perturbation, between the dripping little fountain and the enlarged ears laid out on the floor. The theme and the sense of dramatization are surprising. The ears, meaty looking terrifying monsters, are all that remains on the floor of lost and unknown entities. But upon careful observation, each one of them is connected by an electric wire, creating a colony that can spread and protect itself. Will the vibrations be those of the organs breathing or their last spasm? Here Ruth challenges the public.
Both the ear theme, used by the artist to connect to the selective listening concept, and the theme of the back and forth of the water, is recurrent in Ruth’s work. Thus, in “Editing Room” she had an ear made out of resin, inside which there was an art video without sound. Hearing was represented by the shape of the ear, but the sense needed in the work is the one of sight. The emphasis is placed here on the selection and filtering of data and values picked up by the ears, representing various areas of thought, spirituality, abstraction and sensuality. Sound is equally absent in “I Lost My Heart in Lanzanote,” which consists of a series of art videos centered around the water element, and the hypnotic character of the arrangement reminds us of the repetitive drip of her new installation. Here, the falling drops and the ears are a symbol of the way we assimilate values, opinions and stereotypes.
Ruth Noam does not give the viewer the luxury of taking a step back from an observation and intellectual avoidance standpoint, except by highlighting human weakness, in what concerns the power of sense that knows, sees and listens what it knows or thinks that knows, and not what it really is.
Artists’ House
Exhibition till July 16th
Elkharizi St 9, Tel Aviv-Yafo
Phone: 03-524-6685
SaHaD
Curator, journalist and art agent
Art’Drenaline
www.israelmodernart.com
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