Adam Kalderon

The Ladies of Yesteryear

Kav 16 - Community Gallery for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

April- June 2010 

The Ladies of Yesteryear, Adam Kalderon new exhibition, inaugurates Kav 16 Community Gallery for Contemporary Art new space, at Neve Eliezer community center, Tel Aviv. The exhibition focuses on a series of treated photographed portraits and a video art work. The works are the result of exciting human encounters and alluring cooperation between Kalderon and a group of woman, from the art class at the day care center for elder people at Neve Eliezer neighborhood, Tel Aviv. Gladis, Janet, Rebecca, Esther and Aviva's enlarged portraits hang at the walls like floating at the gallery space. These are portraits which passed a process of enlargement, scanning, Xeroxing, cutting and gluing and eventually turn in to giant cut out papers shaped in to organic motives such as flowers, leafs and roots, resembling embroidery and lace crafts. The result is a sort of organic bouquet composed from individuals, a metaphoric bouquet in which the real and the symbolic are braided in to each other. Kalderon chooses images from the botanical world as blossom and motives of blossoming and withering motives, an analogy to the passing, galloping time that runs out till death. The perforated photographs present a woman's portrait shattered in to pieces, revealing soul cuts and memory fragments, put a side with the passage of time. Contrary, the presentation of a frontal portrait, official and representative, with its origins in classical tradition, carries within itself the potential of seeing the Yesterday Ladies as immortal, sublime portraits, reinforcing visual arts capacity to immortalize memory. Kalderon's real presence at the show can be seen in his flower like self portrait, neither blossoming neither withering, constituting a remainder of time passing, seen youth as a simple passing stage. In general, Kalderon's installation arouses contradictory thoughts concerning the temporary opposite to the eternal. Similar thoughts can be seen in his materials preferences of a simple paper and his artistic process exposing automatic, dynamic and repetitive actions: photograph, Xeroxing, cutting and pasting.   

Curator: Sally Haftel Naveh