| In the information age, meaning has been broken into fragments: bold headlines, disembodied images and floating SoundBits are the rapid and constant messengers of knowledge. War and politics are disseminated into 15-second clips of gesticulating politicians, or bodies dispersing across a distant desert. We attempt, in our own ways, to make sense of this environment by gathering up the pieces and fitting them together. |  |
Avival Beigel – Gregory Christie
In the information age, meaning has been broken into fragments: bold headlines, disembodied images and floating SoundBits are the rapid and constant messengers of knowledge. War and politics are disseminated into 15-second clips of gesticulating politicians, or bodies dispersing across a distant desert. We attempt, in our own ways, to make sense of this environment by gathering up the pieces and fitting them together. From this assemblage we construct stories—bleak or optimistic—to make meaning, shape opinion and explain the scattered and shattered flow of information. Our experience has come to reflect a mosaic and, aesthetically speaking, this mosaic is the best representation of our time. Israeli artist Aviva Beigel is aware of the art form’s potential and has accordingly reinvented the medium.
Beigel’s mosaics are constructed from scripture, conflict, current events, peace, love, nature, ceramic, wood, cement and pigment. These disparate elements are collected from the wreckage of current events, ancient scripture and the artist’s experience in her polarized homeland. She views the art of the mosaic as a physical meditation on Gestalt Theory, which she explains, “proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel and analog with self-organizing tendencies.”
Though her art in many ways reflects the fragmentary nature of modern communication, she responds to it through timeless iconography and symbols that contain long histories and complex meanings: doves, hands, eyes and clusters of grapes. Placing these timeless pieces in the context of the scattered visual geography of our world—particularly the media’s Middle East, built on a barrage of fleeting images—demonstrates, if only visually, the potential for meaningful symbols and gestures to infiltrate the scrambled debris of the information age.
In the context of Contemporary Istanbul, Beigel’s five part series based on the proverb 31:10 graced the walls of the fair in Turkey and said much about the idea of the divine on earth. Beigel’s mosaic proclaims that all divine presence is not about beauty and grace on the surface of things, but about their deeper essence—their light.
