Dalit Gilboa’s collage photographs present an esthetic experience – sweet, absorbed with tension and mystery that insinuate the borders of uncertainty and danger. The photographs present landscapes of a mysterious uncanny environment, alongside images displaying festive birthday tables, on top of which hover glued cakes, ribbons, candy, gifts and scraps on colorful tablecloths, and vacant chairs.
The image hints on one hand, to the interior of a family home, an intimate, protective territory, and a happy festive occasion. On the other hand, it provides no information regarding the people or occasion that occurred. The emphasis is on unattended presence, documentary fragments of nostalgic memory.

The celebration’s starting point evolves into a continuous investigation exploring themes such as petty-bourgeois environment, family affairs, boundaries, aspirations and disillusionment. The personal/family axis intersects the cultural/materialistic axis regarding birthday parties and other happy occasions that relate to feelings, intimacy, and a disillusioned observation of reality vs. expectation.

Gilboa cuts the images from ‘Marie Claire–Maison’, the French magazine dedicated to the “perfect” bourgeois house (a magazine held sacred by its collectors). The paper clips enable her to create the home and the fractured birthday experience. The action of cutting and pasting is present, and allows the exchange of one reality for another. The creation of a fantastic, enchanted collage whose fractures result from the shattering of the festive fantasy and its reconstruction. Gilboa explores the relations between the two and three dimensional. She examines the borders between them, dismantling and reconstructing a totally different structure and reality. What’s hidden at first glance, materializes at further observation. That’s when the torn, ripped, glued and filth emerge.
The elements of the petty-bourgeois house imply a particular status and taste. They reflect a certain design perception which views the house as a platform expressing its owner’s esthetic taste, while they might otherwise be perceived as tasteless kitsch. The collage generates a critique emerging out of a fresh examination of the elements, and an attempt to decrypt them. A chilling moment materializes addressing another contemporary cultural question – Is this a beautiful or a fake world? Does the acquisition of the bourgeois elements of the “perfect” house actually award a promised perfection?

Transitions between a private, biographical world and a world of consumerism and commercials, issues of interior and exterior, and the way memories and expectations are created – all these are clustered into a compassionate picture of solitude.

This exhibition is a direct extension of Gilboa’s preoccupation and exploration in previous work. She returns time and again to the house and its cracked corners, to the “dirty” places. She positions the safe border alongside the dangerous, unsettling one. The exploration of the human space and presence.
In “On the Fingertips” – her 2009 exhibition at the Tel Aviv Artists House , she displayed pictures of her daughters’ rooms alongside body-parts and personal objects hinting to a certain state-of-mind, adolescence, separation and cautious investigation, “on the fingertips” of their environment.
In her “30 cc” exhibition the location examination expanded into presenting photo albums, while the actions of “placing” and cutting the object were the focal point of the studio installation. Various objects united together into an alternately enigmatic or non-literal statement.

Curated by: Rotem Ritov
Gallery Talk: Saturday 16.02.13 | at 11:00

Closing: 03.03.13