ShirA avidor

Intrigued by spaces and objects that relate to a home or part of a house are portrayed as temporary and unstable in the painting. Room interiors; cots, tents, mattresses, rugs, bowls, and various objects found in a dwelling, echo an isolated and uncomfortable place. Images of temporary objects or places that are well known as more stable and tangible-the idea of reassurance, dissolves into borrowed or broken moments, flickering images where past and present memories, feelings and association converge almost forcing the viewers to reexamine their own perceptions of their surroundings, but often become invisible. The ongoing dialog with the long tradition of ‘Memento Mori’ (remember your mortality) genre of painting and ‘passing time’, are mirrored through various images and use of traditional painting methods. 

The cot and tents in the painting reflect the temporary use of a bed or a house, while the scattered objects of clothes, rugs, blankets, branches- bring back the more domesticated feeling to the isolated scene or interior. Visually translated through the dark spaces, subdued lights, subtle color- a palette composed of grays, black and white while other parts show a more ‘busy’- colorful side with patterns, color schemes that become a hybrid world of the vital and the decaying, crossing over from the dull, shadowy and somewhat unpleasant to the “busy” more vital and vigorous pattern and color in the painting. 

Some of the figures: a cloth-figure and a double portrait of a man, add to the mood and sense of decay. These indistinct, blurred, remote images become ghost-like almost as an obliterated presence of a human. 

Similarly in my early work where the focus on interiors, objects, piles of laundry, stained objects and clothes of decaying, crumbling bathroom spaces, tackled the idea of a home although these paintings are viewed in a more symbolic manner, visually simplified and more abstract, centered and focused on a single object. My newer work comes from a different point of view, pushing back, observing the surrounding space from a distance, allowing the objects to have more of a placement. 

These timeless, placeless, ambiguous collective spaces convey partial emptiness and abandonment while the idea of hominess crumbles a-part. 

Education

2004-2006 | Boston University College of Fine Arts | Boston, MA

1998-1999 | Jerusalem Studio School | Jerusalem, Israel

1994-1998 | Bezalel Academy of Art & Design | Jerusalem, Israel