Orit Hofshi: Inspection Chambers

Curator: Irena Gordon

Landscape is commonly defined as all the visible features of an area of land— a totality perceived and interpreted by the human subject. In Mishnaic Hebrew, the word nof (landscape) also denotes the upper part of a tree or plant, its crown or canopy. Space is a three-dimensional extent and may also refer to a spacious and expansive domain whose boundaries lie far apart, as well as a gap, a void, or a blank area. The word place carries a broad range of meanings, including: a portion of space available or designated for someone; a vacancy or unoccupied position; a position in a sequence or hierarchy; a person׳s rank or status; a geographical location, venue, or setting: “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place” (Genesis 1:9), or “for they shall bury in Tophet, till there be no place” (Jeremiah 7:32). In Hebrew, the word for place, in its definite form, also serves as an appellation for God (ha-Makom).

Orit Hofshi׳s (b. 1959, Kibbutz Matsuva) work articulates the intersecting interpretations of landscape, space, and place, as she repeatedly returns to the woodblocks underlying her images, exploring their multiplicity, their incarnations, their modes of existence, as well as their shadows, their ghosts. Her material and formal, conceptual and mental actions themselves constitute a landscape, a space, and a place, carrying history and time, and the relations between culture and nature: earth and water, humans and animals, seem to emerge from one another, mourning and sustaining each other. It is a body that constantly probes itself, its survival, its loss, as a visual archive that bears traces of the time of its formation.

The images dwell in their own ruins, perhaps in their becoming, in an intermediate realm between a concrete place and nowhere; they unfold as cross-sections, rhythms, resonances, while the cracked, tumultuous earth occupies most of the works ׳†visual field. In a continuous seismic movement, in the absence of tranquil or controlled relationship between the figures in the works and the place they inhabit, and between the viewer and the landscape unfolding before her, the horizon is agitated and the surface disintegrates. We are confronted with a hybrid language consisting of woodcut prints on handmade paper, as well as the woodblocks from which they were printed, unprinted carved woodblocks, ink and pencil drawings and paintings, rubbings, monotype prints, and spatial installations. In the exhibition Inspection Chambers, all of these converge into an overarching structure, a visual panorama that can be entered, studied, lived in, while evoking memory.

Originating in ninth-century East Asia, woodcut is the oldest of the reproduction techniques based on a matrix and copies. This printing technique reached Europe in the 15th century, becoming a central means of disseminating images and refining representational techniques. In various currents of modernism, and especially in Expressionism, woodcut became a vehicle of ethical and political protest, charged with

profound psychological and social meanings.

Grounded in woodcut, Hofshi׳s monumental work undermines the distinction between printing block, image and object, between original and reproduction, and is shaped through a virtuoso, painterly and sculptural mastery of the various means of expression. Her images, their traces and echoes, accumulate into an archive from which she continually draws in creating new compositions and meanings. Work on the large-scale pieces is intensive and demands considerable physical effort: drawing, cutting the images into the wooden boards, hand-printing by rubbing a wooden spoon across vast sheets of paper, modulating the pressure applied in the printing process, continued drawing, rubbing and transfer, and finally creating combinations and structures composed of the woodblocks, the papers, and in many cases—both. For many years, Hofshi regarded color as a mere distraction, but in the last decade, her largely monochromatic palette has diversified, and she has incorporated additional print and drawing techniques, in an attempt to deepen and intensify the sense of alienation, estrangement, tension, and existential rupture.

The current, large-scale exhibition presents a recent body of work alongside earlier pieces, leading the spectator into the heart of the dialogue between print and installation, the printed image and spatial experience. Print, as a reproductive, mobile, archival medium that signifies historical time, encounters installation as a one-off, site- and time-specific medium, a medium of the present. Into this constellation, Hofshi introduces, for the first time, readymade objects, inspection chambers: subterranean structures used in infrastructure for sewage, drainage, electricity, and communication, usually made of concrete or plastic. The painterly image of the inspection chambers is thus set against their material presence in the exhibition space.

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors and an artist working in Israel in a present marked by a vortex of violence, Hofshi׳s work is imbued with an awareness of displacement, destruction, and war. It converses with the universal and timeless, while remaining rooted in the local historical and political reality. It carries landscape within it as a continuous tension between nature and culture, between memory and erasure, as an active trauma. The inspection chambers, which are a basic component in contemporary survival infrastructures, are connected in Hofshi׳s work, primarily, to water resources, to its necessity, and to the struggle over it, as part of the broader conflict over nature, land, and place. The landscape genre in Israeli art has, from its inception, been bound up with the formation of national identity, with sublime and romantic visions, with representations of the local and its abstraction in intersecting, antithetical narratives, with sight and oversight, vision and blindness.

Hofshi׳s cinematic-panoramic gesture evokes an archaeological excavation that moves backward and forward from a point of departure in the present. Time in her works is not linear: it flashes like an open wound. Much like the infrastructure remnants and monuments, the human and animal figures are both witnesses to the occurrences and inseparable from them; they turn away from the events, and yet remain stubbornly rooted in them, in gestures of lament and grief. The turbulent, all-encompassing views in her work are material and mental ruins experienced physically, calling the viewer to concentrate on the surface while delving into the depths of her modus operandi.