Jan. 4, 2014 - Aug. 16, 2014
Born in 1985. Lives and works in the Haifa area
Landscape, 2013, oil on canvas
Academy Award Winner for the Year of the Monkey, 2013, oil on canvas
Rectum, 2013, oil on canvas
Blower, 2013, oil on canvas
The Milky Way, 2013, oil on canvas
The Mating Season, 2013, oil on canvas
Ambidextrous, 2013, oil on canvas
Ayana Shany tells stories using painted surfaces and blots on canvas. Her works invite us to different realms. Some of them are possible translations of reality, while others are fashioned from imaginary beings that inhabit her mind and accompany her throughout her life. The scenes created in her mind are transformed into invented, twisted images that range from the figurative to the abstract.
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Shany’s themes are hybrids of daily objects with literary texts she is writing. The works are tantalizingly colorful, calling upon the viewer to decipher them, sometimes using the titles as a clue.
Many of the paintings are related to the artist’s autobiography, memories from her childhood in a kibbutz and special moments in her life. The Mating Season, for example, depicts a bleeding crow in heat – a natural impossibility – inspired by a childhood experience with the artist’s dog. In Landscape, Shany seems to limit the viewer’s field of vision to create a blocked, inaccessible, depthless landscape which conceals an unsolved mystery reminiscent of the creative process. Finally, in The Milky Way she glorifies bovine teats. The teats as fragment, as sacrifice, are animated, perhaps as symbolic of the source of all life.
Shany paints minor, anecdotal moments, her brush capturing passing moments which enhance the qualities of the routine, the uncelebrated and unexceptional in our lives, all generously seasoned with humor.
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