Shadow of a Passing Bird

Osnat Ben Dov

Light shines through the window, illuminating a table in the artist’s home. On it are things that could be found in most homes at some point – five and a half lemons, two corns, a tablecloth, an old book. The economy of a longing wrapped in cabbage leaves or a single white egg.

Ben Dov’s work recounts an extended and intimate act of listening, a long-standing conversation with a still-life set that responds to a life course bringing and removing from her home – a book and a bowl, an insect, a wildflower or a cultivated flower, glassware – tall or low, a napkin or a tablecloth; objects that are related to her personal-familial history, or that have been randomly bound to it. Her poetic work with light invokes within me thoughts of music and breath – a heavy and hot light or one that is cold and clear, the deep sound of a cello echoing in the basement, a single flute trill in the bright attic light, a heavy breath morphing into steam on a window. The smell of time standing still; high notes of bow strings.

Ben Dov’s light on the formal arrangement of objects reveals the Genius Loci* of all that is absent from the photographs yet defines its boundaries — her home, with its rooms and openings, time and the changes it dictates in the various spaces, the development and growth of relations between the objects among themselves and how life binds them to her. Ben Dov’s work unfolds before me like cloth spread over table, a single thread of thought worded through different perspectives, a recognition that understands itself through the photographic action, an observation deciphering its foundations and slow percolation like water trickling into the body. The entire ripening of man is illuminated with the nearing-passing ripening of the orange.

Sofie Berzon MacKie

Exhibition Curator