Yael Meiry presents a new solo exhibition as part of the 2024 Indie Photography Prize, featuring photography, sculpture, and video. These works were created through an observation of the processes and changes the body undergoes, alongside their representation in medical photography. Collected images underwent a mapping and material re-coding, moving back and forth between photography and three-dimensionality. The gaze focuses on transformation as it operates on two levels: the external physicality of the body alongside internal occurrences hidden from the eye. The images evoke the discomfort of existing within the body's shell, the desire to look beyond the layer of skin that envelops us, and the possibility of imagining the various parts that compose our bodies. The creation of life, alongside a scar that may never heal, connects healing and annihilation.
The direct gaze, intimate and exposed under a harsh flash, moves very close to the subject, revealing every minute detail: body hair, an air bubble within a concrete cast, the peeling of sandpaper. The act of photography becomes almost invasive, reaching as close as possible and clinging to the outer envelope. In this way, it parallels a surgical process that begins with the imaging of an organ and ends with cutting through the human shell to reach the depths.

Three photographs of fabrics appear in the exhibition, featuring patterns taken from various hospital sheets. The hospital logos have been removed, and the fabric reappears as a long strip connecting ceiling and floor. Images of cuts and injuries resulting from invasive procedures are displayed alongside photographs of plaster, concrete, and silicone casts created from various medical documents. The works climb over and cover one another, revealing only a portion of the injury while wrapping it in another image.
In a video work, also partially covered by a photograph of a scar, an orchid flower lies on its back and takes slow breaths—perhaps its last, perhaps its first. Within the space, a tidy stack of rectangular plaster casts is positioned, responding in three dimensions to the search for findings in medical imaging.
This exhibition continues Meiry’s preoccupation with issues concerning the perception of the subject within transitional spaces, situated between the physical body and gender identity. The circular action of taking an image and transferring it between different states of matter and material characterizes the works, connecting the existence of objects in reality with their exposure from their hiding place, deep beneath the body’s protective layer.

Orchid, loop
Editor: Timna Perez

 

In the exhibition Breathing In & Staying Out Of The Sun, Yael Meiry explores the similarity between the gallery space and botanical gardens as two spaces of display designed for aesthetic consumption. Both spaces involve collection and present their findings to visitors, who are captivated by them. They are also spaces of leisure. The garden is a museum of the living, while the gallery, in contrast, is understood in art history as a mausoleum, a cemetery. In the exhibition, connections are marked between these two spaces, between what is defined as nature and what is defined as culture, touching on the randomness, freedom, construction, artificiality, and order that characterize them. One of these connections is found behind the scenes of the gallery: several plaster casts whose form is inspired by the metal frames in which projectors are placed. The casts evoke the act of framing, just as nature is framed into fenced capsules, controlled reserves of wild nature intended for display. During their time at Oranim and in the garden, Meiry directs their gaze toward the ground, the earth on which the garden grows, and collects from within it. In contrast to scientific classification that embodies hierarchies, Meiry's collection is arbitrary and random, a discovery that begins with dwelling in the garden, a collection of treasures stemming from wonder. Stones are taken just as a photograph is "taken."

A parallel process occurs in the plaster sculptures in the exhibition. They were created inspired by free wandering in the garden, using a technique of material subtraction and addition. Alongside working with a mold, the sculpture includes a study and examination of movement within it. Collecting stones continues Meiry's preoccupation with the body, the stone as a limb of a rock that has detached from it. On a wooden pedestal in the space, small pinkish stones are seen. The stones were created through soft silicone casts and peach pigment reminiscent of skin color, an apparent genetic replication of the human body. In contrast to the power relations that characterize portrait photography, the photography of the stones and the preoccupation with them specifically attempts to escape the aggressiveness that characterizes the act of photography during portraiture. For Meiry, the gaze at the stone, and at the private and collective history embodied in its geology, brings to mind a discussion of the concepts of "nature" and "naturalness" as normalizing ideologies. The stone is an object that has a history on one hand, yet lacks a priori definitions on the other. This type of gaze is offered to visitors of the exhibition, as in the garden, a lingering gaze: to breathe in and stay out of the sun.

Kalanit (Anemone), 6:52
Installation view at Oranim Gallery and the work
Editor: Haviv Kaptzon
Photographers: Yuval Alon & Yael Meiry

The exhibition is based on Meiry's artist'sbook, Doing Right by You, published in 2018. Thebook is based on an archive containing about 150 photographs, in which the artist photographedthemself, the people close to them, and the spacesaround them. As in other projects, Meiry uses lowtechtechnologies alongside digital media.
Following the book, the photographs in this exhibitionpresent a violent, disturbing connection between Israeli spaces and queer bodies. The complex images are at one and the same time feminine and masculine. They reveal a deep fracture in the binary role division that accompanies the modern gaze, which routinely labels, sorts, and categorizes. Culture scholar Sivan Rejuan Shtang notes that Meiry's photographs center on the relationship between the body, classified according to gender, and territory that is classified as "national." According to Shtang, "The bodies appearing in Meiry's photographs are simultaneously vulnerable and bold." The bodies that appear in Meiry's artistic territory can be considered using in the philosophical terms proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Deleuze and Guattari posit that territory is always corporeal, and that the body is always territorial. In this context they coined the term "geo-body." For them, the "body" is perpetually in a process of becoming – as a concept, image, or role. In this sense, Meiry creates bodily territories or territorial bodies that reorganize relations between the images, roles, and concepts of sexuality, gender, and Zionism. In Meiry's works, bodies "become queer." Heteronormative hysical appearance becomes fluid and s not subject to essentialist and incontrovertible oncepts.
Meiry creates an intense, courageous body of works that grants visibility to the local queer-feminist community. This act necessarily situates them on the margins of the Israeli sociopolitical rena. The forms appearing in the works eflect a position that calls for the dismantling f the powerful Zionist regime of visibility in the thnocratic State of Israel. In the twenty-first entury, this state is still based on a binary and ierarchical gender role division, which Meiry seeks to question.

Yossi, 2014, 60x45 / Andi and Herzl, 2017, 150x200
Flower Necklace, 2014, 40x30 / Rash, 2014, 40x30
Orchid, 2009, 40x30
// Archival inkjet and ChromaLuxe prints

Pillows, 2014, 50x60 / Ein Ovdat, 2017, 150x200
see previous / Cherry Blossom, 2010, 60x45
Aloe Vera in Hukok, 2016, 53x40 / Pendant #3, 2016, 30x40
// Archival inkjet and ChromaLuxe prints


Central wall: Dog Tag, 2014, 37.5x50 / Pomegranate, 2017, 37.5x50
Guli and Or, 2017, 225x300 / Tulip (Emerging Bud), 2016, 35x35
// Archival inkjet prints

Dog Tag, 2014, 37.5x50 / Pomegranate, 2017, 37.5x50
// Archival inkjet prints

Sacred Fig, 45x60, 2016/ Outside the Cave of the Patriarchs, 70x90, 2014
// Archival inkjet prints


Agave, 2016, 45x50 / Getting Ready for Independence, 2016, 57x70 
Irises (with My Sister), 1990, 35x50 
// Archival inkjet prints

The first solo exhibition of works by Yael Meiry addresses the experience of physical and gendered cohesion with photographs of bodies and plants. Meiry tests the connection between the queer bodily experience, with which they exists in the world, and plants that grow in the urban expanse.
The works, and their mode of display, seek to create a zone that is open to the possibility of presenting the self and its approach to gender by touching on terms such as nature and naturalness. 
The photographic medium, and use of strong flash lights and violent frame cuts, highlights the battle between the growing thing and its living environment: the fence that confines it, the earth that limits its spread, and the artificial light, which unlike natural light does not usually nourish the plant sufficiently.
A booklet, also titled Rightgendered was published prior to the exhibition, at the beginning of 2017. It brings works from the past two years that center of bodily experiences and feelings of gender incongruence.

The project began as a study of the male body, by photographing friends with a particular focus on their chests and hips. Along with those works are also portraits and photographs of other body parts. Photographs of fruit and various plants are incorporated among the other images. These were captured playfully in Meiry’s mobile studio – their outstretched arm – itself a recurring motif in their works.
The photographs echo different styles, including fashion and documentary photography. The stylistic fusion enhances Meiry’s interest in cataloging, codifying and defining. Blowing up a number of photographs to large, unnatural scales serves to make viewers feel their own bodily presence in space.
The exhibition and Meiry’s photographs were created from a queer viewpoint and offer a self-presentation of an identity rarely represented in the Israeli art world.

installation photos by Hila Ido

The book features selections from Meiry’s photographic archive, approximately 150 photographs in total. Divided into four sections, these function as separate booklets inside the comprehensive volume. The images in the book present a violent and disturbing relationship between Israeli spaces and queer bodies. Each photographic sequence is accompanied by an intimate conversation, an interview with the subjects portrayed in the photos.
The conversations reflect on the relationships with some of Meiry's ongoing subjects - Their Mother, partner and a close friend. They revolve around the roles created for them in the work.
Using feminist research practices, Meiry wishes to focus on more than the subject's physical appearance and bring the voice of the people involved in the project.

These talks provide a guideline for the photo-editing of the book, and they illuminate the photo-sequences with key concepts relating to the images. The main essay, written by Dr. Sivan Rajuan Shtang, a researcher of visual culture specializing in gender and identity politics, examines the work in the context of international queer photography and the history of local art theory.
The publication of the book was made possible with the support of The Israeli National Lottery Council for the Arts and Asylum Arts.