Date of Submission

Spring 2015

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Art History; Studio Arts; Asian Studies

Project Advisor 1

Mika Endo

Project Advisor 2

Laura Battle

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Artist Statement

The work presented in the show is composed of many aspects I was dwelling on this past year. It is a bit of a mess. I spent five months in Japan last spring and have been exposed to a display of visuals and lifestyles different than my own. It made me realize, more than ever, that people around the world live with diverse identities rooted deeply in the homes and cultures they were brought up in. This experience showed me how significant the concept of home is to each one of us. I like to think of home as the ultimate layer of skin. Our home walls protect us; the electrical wires and the myriad of pipes hidden inside are the blood vessels and the nerve system. Homelessness is being stripped of your skin and exposed to all the dangers of the outside.

Growing up in Israel, I lived in the same house all my life. Only recently I came to appreciate how crucial this home was to who I became. Since I arrived in the US, I moved around a lot and located myself in various types of rooms inside foreign houses. It was always important to me to design my private space in a very specific way reminiscent of that home I grew up in. That childhood home became a model through which I imagined everybody else’s cherished home. My increased awareness to the sanctity of home has made me very sensitive to every devastation of a home, no matter where in the world. It is heart-breaking for me to witness people having to lose their protective skin.

At first, my work combined two fields: Studio Art and Asian Studies. My Asian Studies thesis focuses on Japanese artists in the aftermath of WWII, mainly the Gutai Group, who made drastically non-traditional and experimental work with the purpose of freeing the artistic spirit of Japan from the conformity of the war era. However, incorporating studio art into my thesis, modified my direction and took me on a somewhat different path than first presumed. My own artistic work was affected by the theoretical emphasis on the activist and free-spirited Japanese avant-garde Gutai and other similar groups.

When I first stepped into my studio, it was white and bare, which was to me quite intimidating. Consequently, I have decided to paint it all, walls, ceiling and floor. I wanted to create another layer of skin for myself to protect and envelop myself. But this is of course temporary. Once I am done using it, it must be painted back to white. I hope every visitor will enjoy my temporary shelter and in the future remember that it was here for a little while.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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