Shay Arick
Throughout the years, I have crafted conceptual works delving into issues of violence, social taboos, political conflicts, and the intricate relationship between power and discipline. I am captivated by constructing installations that blend different mediums, such as sculpture, drawing, and photography. These installations aim to create surprising and yet poetic juxtapositions between the works, occasionally infused with a touch of humor.
Since 2020, my focus has been on two coexisting art practices. These distinct works coalesce, with one practice nourishing the other, resulting in dramatically varied visual approaches and content.
The first practice is oil pastel drawings. I used to draw when I began making art, and later drifted away from it into other art mediums. I came back to it when I started teaching children to draw. The spontaneity in which they use oil pastels, with tremendous freedom, and without any inhibitions inspired me to pursue drawings. I started developing intuitive, organically crafted oil pastel drawings that are born out of my delight in visual play, and connection to pure materiality. My drawings present abstraction and dream-like metaphors contained in compressed spaces. I create them without any advanced plans or research. These drawings hold both intentional and incidental actions, creating a kind of condensed, physical evidence of my dreams and internal conflicts.
The second body of work began during the pandemic, when I was quarantined in the mountains of Jerusalem almost three years ago. Collecting flowers and weeds from nearby fields, I later cut stems, connected leaves, and assembled the various parts into new plant configurations. Each architectural plant was created intuitively and documented, resulting in a new photograph series titled "Second Nature," based on Israel's flora. This work serves as an index of alternative flora, responding to my inner aesthetic logic—a new nature originating from the realms of abstract minimalism. The new plants are elegant and poetic on one side, but physically harms the natural integrity of the plant. This practice is continually evolving, and currently, I am immersed in crafting a new series of dried plant sculptures.