The Merge: Art Reception

After 7 years of working together on separate parallel paths, Dana Stirling and Yoav Friedländer’s works meet in a duo exhibition. Coming from similar yet different backgrounds both artists are Israelis born to families of immigrants. This unique exhibition will merge two bodies of works and juxtapose their perception of identity, and the role photography takes on.

Dana’s work in the medium of photography focuses on a search for identity and the process behind curating a family album.
Raised by British parents and growing up in Israel when looking at her family albums, Dana felt misplaced. In her photographic work she reexamines the notion of identity through family association, adopts abandoned and discarded family moments in the form of found footage and used objects with ephemeral qualities, appropriates and reclaims them as her own in order to imagine new possible narratives, and also conducts photographic journeys in which she overlays an imagined historical narrative onto places that are not related to her past.

Yoav was also born into the desert landscapes of Israel, where he sees himself native, yet uprooted from his past. His works showcase a chaotic perception of an "Americanized Israeli"; a composite of mediated American culture, desert landscapes, and war, which became an integral part of his life. Friedländer’s photographs examine a reality that has become augmented by its own image.
His images of scale models mixed with straight photographs, both of Israel and the US , form a conjunction between two different cultures and sets of geographical locations.
While the miniatures are recreations of places which he has no access to, memories of the past and places and spaces he had seen only in photographs, all of his straight photographs portraying the landscape are physically taken when standing on the side of a road, intentionally not accessing it fully, yet creating a deception of being there.
Friedlander’s miniatures are made to doubt the real of the original and bare the illusion of the photograph, in a world where our perception of reality is influenced by its own images.

Dana and Yoav are a power couple working and living together from their apartment & studio in Forest Hills, Queens NY.