CATALOG_TOM PORAT - English-for-web

with a poetic and imaginative space. The result questions the obvious, the familiar, and the well- known and creates a journey of enchantment and beauty, combined with bewilderment and confusion . The work consists of a collection of images that are assimilated and communicate with each other, creating a complex, enigmatic, fluid, and compressed array, interwoven with airy, soft and even empty images, in which dark becomes light, positive becomes negative, and colored becomes black and white. The camera’s lens wanders over the surface, then dives in, racing to the depths of infinity. The reality that is as familiar as the concrete walls of the building, the windows and chairs, is revealed to the viewer’s eye and immediately afterwards disintegrates into fragments. The dissonance between the familiar and expected and the unusual and surprising occurs over and over, disrupting the self-evident sense of reality and reexamining the continuum of observation. The experience is reminiscent of William Turner’s (1775–1851) iconic painting, Rain, Steam, and Speed – the Great Western Railway , which depicts a train hurtling along a track, blurred by speed, emerging from the fog. With a sharp perspective, brushstrokes, and color, Turner created confusion between the concepts of technology and nature during the nineteenth century Romantic era, when technological progress erupted into the world and changed it beyond recognition. Porat’s main video work, projected onto the concrete wall, conveys the feeling of traveling between galaxies, spaces, and worlds. Its layers of observations, associations, and memories, both personal and universal, bring together the physical-realistic with the imaginative and poetic, evoking travel through another universe or perhaps another consciousness. Alongside the fascination, there is a sense of bewilderment and confusion that looks beyond architectural aesthetics. The second part of the installment features an additional ten video works, which are projected simultaneously onto screens in the pillared gallery. These consist of an index of digital collages; a kind of “image archive” for the collection of different details from the space itself. These objects, both virtual and real, are seen from different perspectives. The items, including a handle, pillar, armchair, stairway, and bridge, among others, combine in different ways. By connecting individual motifs – distinct or not – and reproducing them, both familiar and alien images are created.