In his sculpture The Brothers, Ziv Ben Dov casts the fused portraits of his siblings and himself. The brothers kneel down in a row creating a united front. They are wrapped in resilient fabric that joins all three, bringing a dynamic of dualities and tensions to the surface as the topography of multi-organed dissolution. The casting of the form on all three is a multi-participant event orchestrated as a scheduled, engineered act. In his sculpture Ben Dov presents himself and his brothers as variations of each other via duplication and repetition, deviation and development, as a prehistoric family of hunters-gatherers.
The siblings are separated and united in the cast. They rest, yet alert in a squat, a type of Asian sitting or a Gideonian wait. When they crouch or, as Ben Dov calls it, assume a “defecating baboon” position, they appear under a cover, striving to breath.
Ben Dov’s group of brothers – one hand holding onto their chin, the other onto a cup placed on their knee, as if waiting for an opportune moment – alludes to Rodin’s The Thinker. In Freud’s Totem and Taboo the accomplicity of the band of brothers is the foundation stone of civilization. The three brothers made of black silicon lay low and wait.
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