Shirly Bar-Amotz: Happy Days

Artist list

Shirly Bar-Amotz

Jewelry serves artist Shirly Bar-Amotz as a means for making socially relevant statements. Using "free craft" which combines precious metals with synthetic materials and ready-made molds, Bar- Amotz creates tiny worlds, seemingly from European landscapes: forests, lakes and snow-capped mountains, as well as animals trapped in mounds of
color, forming a duality of joyful colorfulness and a tough reality.

Combining precious metals with synthetic materials and readymade die-cut objects, Bar-Amotz crafts miniature worlds that look as if they were taken from pictures of European landscapes: woods, lakes, and snowy mountains. These images, like the pastoral vistas she "stains," express longing for a lost memory. They represent the diasporic European culture that Zionist Israeli society has suppressed and erased in its endeavor to create a new culture. Striving to restore something of that erased memory in her works, Bar-Amotz is well aware that they are created in quite a different cultural environment. This is evidenced by the works' crowded aesthetic, which stems from an observation of Israeli public space - the tar, the overly-colorful palette, the commercial signs, the noise and the over-decorativeness. The jewelry landscapes are populated with animals from "over there," such as swans, bears and rabbits. Circus animals like elephants and lions are ensnared in a tangle of colorful balloons and lights, while others are drowning in a mound of paint or trapped among trees and shrubs that prevent them from moving. Under a deceptive guise of carnivalesque vibrancy, these animals are deeply stuck in the reality of their existence.

Iris Fishof
Curator of the exhibition