Orna Wind
Paintings

Opening: Thursday, 10 June 2004, 8 p.m.
Closing: 24 July 2004

Orna Wind’s solo exhibition, Paintings (June 2004), will take up the entire space of the gallery, and consist of twelve oil paintings on canvas in varying large formats. This body of work is comprised of a sequence of female images – cultural icons extracted from western history and art alongside images of veiled Muslim women, concluding with a self-portrait. The majority of figures emerge against the backdrop of “explosions” – a screen of hurled stones and pillars of smoke. In her self-portrait, Wind is seen against the backdrop of light-blue sky, busy painting the image of the shattering stone, the one perpetuating the evolution of the background in the other paintings. Snow White, Lara Croft, Jessica Rabbit, Michelangelo’s Rachel, a virgin extracted from a painting by Tintoretto, and female soccer icon Brandy Chastain, are among the images addressed by Wind.

The current series continues Wind’s project in the past ten years, which may be read as a fascinating exercise in constituting female identity – a process that has undergone changes and transformation concurrent with the development of this theme in the feminist discourse.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Naomi Aviv. It spans a comprehensive body of work, from the time of Wind’s studies at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem to the present, as well as two essays written over the years. Naomi Aviv’s essay accompanying the current exhibition is entitled “The Ephemerality of the Moment.” It discusses the Hollywood-like atmosphere emanating from the paintings, an atmosphere typified by a cross between the glamorous and the dark. Furthermore she distinguishes between the background – the explosion – and the figures painted at the forefront. While the female images are painted one-by-one as isolated, “phallocentric” icons, Aviv reads the backdrop as an image symbolizing female sexuality, in keeping with French scholar Luce Irigaray’s description of a sexuality “lacking a formed shape,” that is always “not one but is more than two” (as opposed to male sexuality which is often deemed “monolithic”). Aviv likens Wind’s persistent repetition of images of women and femininity to an act of deconstruction, maintaining that “the repetitiveness reveals the […] illogic embedded in stereotypical notions and the acute need for definitions and other conceptualizations of women.”