Born in 1972, lives and works in Tel Aviv
Mirrors, 2013, video installation, 7:35 min.

The work of Shay-Lee Uziel hybridizes children’s instructional film and a film documenting an artistic action. The artist, wishing to illuminate his dark studio with a set of mirrors, shares with us his plan and dilemmas. Like many other activities, the mirror games he plays with his daughter stress the joint playful aspect of the world of art and that of children. As far as children are concerned, beside the pleasure they derive from it, a game is a sensuous means of getting acquainted with the world: a discovery and exploration tool, a way to build an imaginary autonomous world, in which the child engages in a dialog with him- or herself. The poet Charles Baudelaire argued that the minute a child starts playing with toys, he or she begins to experience art: “The toy is the child’s earliest initiation to art, or rather for him it is the first concrete example of art, and when mature age comes, the perfected examples will not give his mind the same feelings of warmth, nor the same enthusiasms, nor the same sense of conviction […] The overriding desire of most children is to get at and see the soul of their toys […].”