| Fleetingness and fluidity are two aspects of nature that lure me to the subject matter in my landscape installations. A winter flurry can suddenly transport me to the interior of a snow globe, but such a moment can never be captured. It melts and disappears. Although sunsets and windy vistas enchant me, I build landscapes in direct contradiction to the natural phenomena that inspire them. By restaging transitory atmospheric events in a heavily theatrical, static and almost flat way, I am attempting to seize the unseizable. In my earlier performance piece, Windy Forest, I represent the wind with small props that are hand-held. Such simplifications bring us away from the physical properties that we experience in the world, and closer to the realm of icons and symbols that we read about or imagine. |  |
Catching the Star – Karen Azoulay
Fleetingness and fluidity are two aspects of nature that lure me to the subject matter in my landscape installations. A winter flurry can suddenly transport me to the interior of a snow globe, but such a moment can never be captured. It melts and disappears.
Although sunsets and windy vistas enchant me, I build landscapes in direct contradiction to the natural phenomena that inspire them. By restaging transitory atmospheric events in a heavily theatrical, static and almost flat way, I am attempting to seize the unseizable. In my earlier performance piece, Windy Forest, I represent the wind with small props that are hand-held. Such simplifications bring us away from the physical properties that we experience in the world, and closer to the realm of icons and symbols that we read about or imagine.
I have always envisioned parallels between weather and gestures of human emotion. As spectacles of joy and celebration, fireworks are the perfect hybrid of precipitation and confetti. Particles of colored fire fill the sky and shower us from above. Reflecting our own moods on to the landscape that we inhabit in a moment of great pride and excitement, we play Mother Nature and make the skies rain down on us with explosions of our own emotion.
The body of work included in the CUE Art Foundation exhibition features sculpture and installation as well as photography that incorporates these three dimensional objects. These staged scenarios are reminiscent of the tradition of tableaux vivant. The photograph Catching the Star explores another kind of fire that moves through the night. What can be seen as an abstraction of a shooting star is something I created using the fabric of a battered umbrella. What once was used as protection from blustering storms now has a new destiny: to fly through the skies without limitation. The character performing as a swimmer in the image is reaching for those qualities and perhaps is going to grasp on to them and be pulled up from her familiar waters into the expectant unknown.
