When artist Vered Lahav discovered a dead bird on the side of the road, she began to think about the lessons one should have learnt in a lifetime and consequently a saying began to form in her mind, ‘If birds could read and books could fly.’ The contrasting of the two impossible functions in that phrase is the inspiration behind this new body of work, Légendes, due to open at BCA Gallery on Saturday 27 May 2006.
The installation, Légendes, takes its title from a French word meaning ‘myths’ or the captions that appear beneath a photograph in a book or an album. Art Critic Robert Clark has described Lahav’s work as a “poetic collage of evocative image fragments created through combinations of photography… and… sculptures immaculately constructed from a variety of materials.” (Robert Clark, The Légendes Catalogue, 2005)
In Légendes, the sculptural element is provided by the rusted, bronze cast sculptures of seven weighty books, supported by long thin rods, that grow out of flat square bases, rooted to the gallery floor. The raw and deliberately distressed appearance of these objects offers a stark contrast to the simplicity of the seven large-scale photographs featuring individual, common or garden species of bird, that lie against a clean, white backdrop.
The deceased birds can be seen as symbolic of human existence, while the upright stands imitate lecterns, alluding to the lessons one might have learnt during one's lifetime. Each tome is splayed with its pages open, in a manner suggestive of a bird in flight, and it is in this simple resemblance that Lahav makes her poetic connection.
As with Lahav’s previous work, Légendes can be defined as a form of mixed-media collage in which a series of images are set in three dimensional spatial relation to one another. The exhibition exists less as individual components and more as a whole because of the specific dialogues that have been constructed between each image and object.
Vered Lahav is an intriguing artist who has exhibited widely nationally and internationally, at venues in Hamburg, London, Bath, Tel Aviv, Manchester, Birmingham, Osnabruck, plus many more. Lahav is a photographer and installation artist, known best for her beautiful and unusual photographic installations, that juxtapose photography and three-dimensional objects made from a variety of materials – glass, wax, wood and rusted metal.
A catalogue will accompany this exhibition and will be available for purchase from BCA Gallery.
Close window