ONLY CONNECT!

Curated by Thomas Rom

Participating Artists: The Haas Brothers, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Reuven Israel, Liora Kaplan, Jordan Nassar, Solange Pessoa and Li Shurui. 

July 4 – September 12, 2019

Opening Reception: July 4, 2019, 8 pm

Braverman Gallery is pleased to present a unique group of artists in a new exhibition curated by Thomas Rom. For many of the artists, this is the first time their work is being showcased in Israel, as well as one beside the other. 

"Only Connect!" responds to a world that parallels our current moment: one needs to embrace emotion, imagination, and the mystical all the more tightly, but do so in a way that doesn’t exclude or evade physical reality. It’s through connecting and weaving rational and spiritual elements together that true knowledge and fulfillment can be achieved. 

The participating artists have unsurprisingly led the way in connecting and playing with these tendencies of simultaneous rationality and spirituality. their works provide portals through which to tap into the collective consciousness, collapsing of past, present, and future into essential and universal knowledge. 

Liora Kaplan’s work digests, references, and criticizes pop culture while engaging with aesthetics of shamanic indigenous tribes. The motif of the snake, an ancient symbol of healing is repeated across Liora’s works in this show suggesting that, if war is a constant, the spiritual process of healing must also be a constant.

The snake motif is also present in the patterning of a rare abstract work The Den (2012) by Trenton Doyle Hancock. This pattern is utilized heavily in Trenton's work as a reference to his impressionable early childhood memories of the floor tiles within his religious home.

Solange Pessoa, a practicing Shaman, frequently embeds in her works pigments and techniques used by tribes from her region of Brazil, a simultaneous tie to and abstraction from a specific place, time, and meaning that is also hyper-present in Jordan Nassar’s work. Nassar, who will open a solo exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv in coming September, uses Palestinian embroidery motifs that have been developed over centuries as a deeply encoded means of communication. Channeling contemporary issues both personal and political through this ancient means of communication. 

Reuven Israel’s practice has long delved into ceremonial artifacts and religious sites, ‘abstracting the abstract,’ into its most basic energetic form and manifesting that essence in sleek sculptures that recall a futurist’s totem.

Li Shurui’s pieces play with the deeply intertwined nature of light and dark within spiritual presence and practice. Her paintings are to be glimpsed in brief moments of increased light emanating from the LEDs of her film As seen by (2019) presented in the Bakery. The film, commissioned by Dior premiered at Art Basel in Hong Kong 2019.

Two beaded sculptures by The Haas Brothers also speak to the reinvention of past artistic forms. The works result from a collaboration between the brothers and bead workers from the Xhosa tribe in South Africa. Building off of the uncanny, surrealist language that the artists have developed, translating the results of their efforts to connect to higher realms — making ordained the mundane.  

The exhibited works call to mind the words of contemporary philosopher Graham Harman about the relationship between objects of the mind and objects that exist in real life when he writes, “Sensual objects always have real qualities. Simply by dreaming up any random monster, we have not automatically generated a real object, but we have generated real qualities.”  “Only Connect!” not only generates real qualities but also real, difficult questions inherent in opening doors to new realms of thinking and consciousness. And yet the works rarely provide answers to the questions that they ask, instead keeping the door open for us to play, meditate, contemplate and experience.  

For further information please contact press@bravermangallery.com