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Digg"The Tree House Kit" and "Berkeley Island"
April 15, 2006- May 13, 2006
Reception: April 15, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Guy Ben-Ner
Postmasters Gallery
459 W 19th StPostmasters Gallery is pleased to present second solo exhibition in New York by Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner. The show will include two works: "Treehouse Kit " - sculpture and video installation originally commissioned for the Israeli Pavillion at the 51st Venice Biennale 2005, and "Berkeley Island" (1999), the very first video that set the parameters of his unique do-it yourself "home movies". "Berkeley's Island" has never been shown in the US.
Low-tech, but ingeniously inventive Ben Ner videos center around home and family, exploring, exposing and exploiting the relationship he has with his children. Simultaneously serious and funny, tender and torturous, they resonate with and built on history of cinema. Guy Ben-Ner is known for his video "Moby Dick" (2000) - a silent slapstick conceptual comedy in which he reenacted the famous novel in his kitchen with his six years old daughter. His subsequent works "Elia - a story of an Ostrich Chick" (2003) and "Wild Boy" (2004) also featured the artist and his children.
In the two works in the current show the family looms large, but the children and wife are mostly absent from the frame. Robinson Crusoe is an anchor of both narratives. Ben-Ner is alone, acts alone - isolation, dislocation and self reliance show the flipside of love, security and interdependence that defines family life.
"Treehouse Kit " consists of a large wooden tree created from recombined generic furniture (chairs, table, bed etc.). The sculpture is presented along with an instructional style video in which Ben-Ner (in swimtrunks and a huge beard, a cross between Robinson Crusoe and and an archetypical Israeli settler) converts the pre-fab tree back into a rudimentary home.
In "Berkeley's Island", the first video to address his position of "domestic artist," Ben-Ner placed a small sandy island complete with a palm tree in the middle of the kitchen and became a shipwreck survivor living in solitude amidst domestic life going on around him. Through exstential introspection combined with often hilarious use of resources that the kitchen set provides ("I learned to use what the island supplied me with"), "Berkeley's Island" depicts the home enviroment as an exile and simultaneously as a place to escape from.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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