Surfers#2, 2024, pastel on paper, 280/100 cm, diptych

Hug, 2024, pastel and graphite on paper, 100/70 cm

Eaten View, 2024, pastel and graphite on paper, 70/100 cm

White reindeer, pastel on paper, 100/70 cm

Route, charcoal and pastel on velvet paper, 40/50 cm

Surfers#1, 2024, pastel on paper, 22/22 cm

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Covering the nothingness in birds (Zelda), 2024, mixed media on paper, 17/23 cm

Last breath, 2024, light box, 38x38 cm

Akeida, 2024, light box, 31x38 cm

I Cover the Nothingness with Birds, Alfred Gallery, exhibition view

I Cover the Nothingness with Birds

​​A solo exhibition by Yael Ben Shalom
Curator: Jenny Aharon
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"The creature gazes into openness with all
its eyes. But our eyes are
as if they were reversed, and surround it,
everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.
We know what is outside us from the animal’s
face alone: since we already turn
the young child round and make it look
backwards at what is settled, not that openness
that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.
We alone see that: the free creature
has its progress always behind it,
and God before it, and when it moves, it moves
in eternity, as streams do.
We never have pure space in front of us,
not for a single day, such as flowers open
endlessly into. Always there is world,
and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure,
unwatched-over, that one breathes and
endlessly knows, without craving. As a child
loses itself sometimes, one with the stillness, and
is jolted back. Or someone dies and is it.
Since near to death one no longer sees death,
and stares ahead, perhaps with the large gaze of the creature.
Lovers are close to it, in wonder, if
the other were not always there closing off the view.....
As if through an oversight it opens out
behind the other......But there is no
way past it, and it turns to world again.
Always turned towards creation, we see
only a mirroring of freedom
dimmed by us. Or that an animal
mutely, calmly is looking through and through us.
This is what fate means: to be opposite,
and to be that and nothing else, opposite, forever".
(Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, translated by A. S. Kline)

A white deer stands tall, above two figures, behind a window. Strangely, it is distinct and separate from the reality surrounding it, yet rooted in it nonetheless. Its gaze is vacant, touching yet not touching, embodying a quality characteristic of dream time. Where is it? In a canyon? On the street? Surrounded by a murmur of reality, enveloped by a harsh presence, yet also by something almost mundane, the deer is completely immersed in an otherworldly, animalistic existence. The deer and its gaze seem to view the beyond, the openness described in Rilke's poem.
Through the eyes of artist Yael Ben Shalom, reality is a collection of parallel layers of existence which sometimes become inseparable. This way of seeing observes multiple layers of existence simultaneously. It is not a hallucinatory or imagined view, but one that, when it lingers on a body, for example, views it simultaneously, like an X-ray or ultrasound, MRI, or CT scan: the bones, the internal organs, the body cells, the cells of the soul. The movement of the diaphragm, the bronchi, the blood, and the heart.
I Cover the Nothingness with Birds presents us with an array of works that is akin to a map legend of the soul; a world. It is an invitation to a different gaze, vulnerable and human, familiar to anyone willing to see it and through it, yet still enigmatic. The embrace, the connection, the prayer, these speak to us from the works in a language of unstripped states. A language based on an internal legend of humanistic emotions. Thanks to this legend, the works can be deciphered through recognition that separate consciousnesses can coexist in a partnership.
Ben Shalom uses familiar formulas and established symbols, situating them between worlds – between existence and nothingness, past and future, mundane and sacred. Amongst all these, we are invited to wander, to let them sift into significance in our consciousness and senses.
The range of realities extending from interior to exterior, home to wilderness, sublime to ordinary, is the artist’s natural habitat. The timeless embrace of lovers, a woman standing on the brink of an abyss, her direction unclear, an xray of lungs, a stone seemingly planted in space, a view from a canyon, the expanse of an ice-skating scene, and more—all are rooted in reality and realism, but hover slightly beyond it, as if seen through a glass screen, contemporary and yet timeless. In Ben Shalom's world, the animal's gaze, as in Rilke's poem, is a simultaneous place of dense earthiness and infinity. She mediates the transformative passage with ease, revealing to us what lies beyond ordinary scenes.
The images and figures in Ben Shalom's works seem to be in a constant state of yearning, alongside calm acceptance of reality. So, the horse that seems to have swallowed the natural world surrounding it is not disturbed by this, it is as if the animal is merely a witness to the ingestion, not an active participant; as if it is only alluding to what is happening, as if it owns a key to the mystery.
If in most solo exhibitions, the creator's manner of observation is spread out for exhibition viewers, wandering among the works in Covering the Void with Birds is more akin to looking out from within the socket of the artist's eye. She generously and openly lends us, for a fleeting moment, a glimpse into the refined and unique gaze with which she perceives existence, in all its manifestations.
​
Text: Jenny Aharon