installation photos by Hila Ido

“‘How do you react when you are misgendered?’ they ask.
I wonder how I would react if I were ever rightgendered.”

(Tanya Rubinstein)

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.