Mind the Gap, 2008, installation

Having entered the space of Ruthi Helbitz Cohen’s installation Mind the Gap, the viewer finds himself at the heart of an imaginary nightmarish space. The setting, consisting of painted paper cutouts, initially calls to mind a thicket of a wood generated by images whose physical presence in the space is palpable. The viewer is invited (almost forced) to wander inside the work, encountering, amid scorched trees and turbid pools, images from the external natural world (such as insects, dragonflies, mosquitoes, and butterflies), alongside images from the internal biological sphere (such as embryos, umbilical cord, brain, enlarged heart, and throat), suspended from the walls and ceiling. The images, garnered from diverse sources, are treated similarly: they are painted on grease-proof paper with industrial paints, spray and ink, and are circumscribed by masking-tape which functions as a demarcation line, but at the same time resembles roots or an umbilical cord. The coloration of the cutouts, ranging from airy transparency to a bleeding-burnt hue, and their materiality instill the images with a similar essence. They fuse to generate a single universe in which a different regularity applies to the images, as the artist shifts and undermines proportion, gravity, and spatial perception, situating her world in an intermediate space between dream and wakefulness, between adult nightmare and a children’s fairytale.