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Melanie Daniel

November 2007

 

Melanie Daniel is a Canadian-born artist who moved to Jerusalem in the mid 90's, learned the Hebrew language, and received an MFA degree from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and the Hebrew University. Over the last decade, she has responded to her environment by working in various media such as painting, video and installation, and has exhibited in museums and galleries in Israel, Europe and North America.

 

The Angelika Knapper gallery is hosting Daniel's first solo exhibition in Scandinavia.

 

This new group of paintings addresses the identity of the artist as a voluntarily displaced person, in a state of existential homelessness. Canadian and Israeli landscapes are combined to create a strange new world. The vast expanses of the Canadian wilderness are re-interpreted as "imported" forests created from already cut and rootless logs. From the Israeli landscape, Daniel derives the desert, an exposed place which evokes an atmosphere of acute solitude. The ground is hot, alive and energizing. It swallows up memories and composes itself in present tense.

Influenced by both worlds, the subsequent hybridized space suggests the point of view of both the resident and the foreigner; it is protected and threatened; temporary but anchored to the ground.

 

 www.frieze.com >>

 

Installation view, room 1.

 

Installation view, room 1.

 

Installation view, room 2.

 

Installation view, room 2 and 3.