Tal Uri

“Beauty is not found in the thing itself but in the patterns of the shadows, in the light and the darkness, created between one thing and the next. Similarly the precious stone that shines in the dark will inundate with light if it’s put in the darkness, but if it is exposed to the light of day it loses its charm, just like beauty cannot exist away from the influence of shadows.” – Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

Attempts at conservation and destruction done on different varieties of orchids express the power and beauty of the living object. The act of conservation – freezing, covering in wax, covering in cement, embalming – these are temporary actions. The images themselves gain the meaning of an additional conservation process that symbolizes the “beauty” in the symbiosis between death and life.

A personal encounter with cancer and with feelings of loss and death, both of the soul and of the body, and coming to terms with the change when the disease returned, lead me – in my work – to go out from the personal to the public sphere. In this temporary space, the individual remains anonymous and devoid of meaning.

The works are created out of the view of a system of growth and codependence – similar to the principle of polarity, yin )negative( and yang )positive(, that is connected to brightness in the dark, in life and in death, in the heavens and on earth. They do not deal with “this one against that one” but rather are an extension of the correlation between light and shadow, in order to create an “idealization” of beauty.