I Wish I Was 2
Ever since I can remember, my mother has worked in the theater industry, primarily as an actor. She is now a medical clown. Most of my childhood was spent behind the stage of “Haifa Theater” in Israel. I still have vivid memories of my mother and other actors in the make up room. I was fascinated by the makeup being slowly brushed on the actors’ faces and watching the actors trying on of different wigs. I witnessed the transition of a person becoming a character, a completely new face. Not long ago, I realized that it was this transition that served as my primary inspiration for my latest project, “I Wish I Was”.
These Characters that I made and photograph came from many different art forms, including Performance art such as Marina Abramovich, the photographer Philip Halsman which created the jumpology series which supported Halsman’s belief that whenever a person brings themselves to jump they let go of fears and barriers that they had and they go back to the child in them. As Halsman tried his jump method on his different subjects, I tried to put on a unified mask on different people to see how different they will act out their new face and character. Tim Burton movies and sketches have been a great influence to me as well; his retrospective at the Moma gave me the power and passion of sketching that led me to the idea of this project. My sketches showed unified costume and mask characters that seem misplaced in the situations I drew them out, after not being able to find the striped swimsuits I saw in my mind, I found my inspiration from my family – my mother and cousin which I photographed with cheap costumes I located during a family gathering for a holiday in Los Angeles last spring 2010. From that point I couldn’t stop creating more characters with my friends here in New York as well as in Israel and Berlin. My characters are traveling in search of a quest to their so-called souls.
