Irit Tamari

The point of departure for all my work is photography – but my approach to it comes from a deconstructive sculptural perspective and the end result is always an intersection of the two mediums, expanding and challenging any categorical boundaries between them. The photograph serves for me as a material rather than a fixed image; from this place it is easier for me to question the essence of the image. Through my cutout techniques the end piece not only change the surface of the documented subject (the image) but also broaden the inner discourse of photography and the way we read an image by transcending the possibilities of the photographic image to a new, multidisciplinary unique form.

 

Through the presence of the hands in my work I can bring my desire to revive and refreeze the photographs and make them not only a documentation of a subject but also a motion of material that holds a story and a paradox between the depth and the flatness of the material itself.

 

Today when the inner discourse of photography is so common it is important for me to emphasize my use of hands. Instead of concealing connectors through Photoshop the cut picture connectors and the white back side of the photograph are part of the work.

​

All the searching techniques of how to transform a photograph into a different form have become a language for me, my Photocut language.

 

To make it easier I categorize my body of work into 3 categories:

Photocut 2D: inscribing and peeling the surface of the emulsion/ creating models from cut photographs and re-photo it / collage and pop-up collage

PhotocutT 3D: composed object made of cut photos

Photo –Installation: Wall installations and In-situ installations

 

In all my recent In-situ installations I photographed the space itself (gallery, museum, etc.) and turn it into a material. By doing so, I'm trying to transform the relationship between the space that holds the photographs into a spatial experience of a dialog between a space and his representation. This platform allows me the freedom to work twice with the space: once with the documentation of the space, reconstruct and deconstruct it into a new form, and the second: with the reflection of the reconstruct documentation inside the space which reopen the viewer a new perspective and interpretation of the space while he is standing and experience the dialog between them both.