Only a faint memory remains of the near-documentary materials as Batsry uses them to create a new, hybrid place comprised of reflections, distortions, and concealments of the familiar locus. The documented scenes function as raw material which enwraps the space, intermittently becoming abstract and painterly, impressionist and subjective, and it is only excerpts of sentences in Hebrew and familiar fragments that re-anchor it in the concrete and local. The work introduces questions about localism and exotica, perception and authentic experience, exploring the blurring of boundaries between the concrete and the abstract, the painterly and the documentary, and “the ways in which reality changes, and how it is represented by technology, imagination, and perception.”

Irit Batsry was born in Israel. Lives and works in New York and Paris.

Courtesy of the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery

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