The Pink Line - Artist Wall at Verisimilitude
curator: Audrey Sklar Levy
Sklar Levy Gallery, Modi'in, 2020-21
A political line, a philosophical line, a communications line, an underground line albeit also a timeline, a geographical line that divides our planet in latitude and longitude, Rambam’s middle line because pink is a kind of grey, a Zen grey…in between the fury and passion of red and the peace and enlightenment of white. The Pink as feminism, vulnerability, softness …or simply a life line
Alejandra Okret tackles landscape significantly differently; her wall is a landscape of life, and life as an artist. The first work, Bereshit, was finished many years ago; it is quite possibly the womb which carries the budding artist. As we travel along the wall we move through her biography: the “inner child” so to speak, escaping persecution. This is an indelible part of the artist’s roots, and in that way, her own timeline. Later we see other, personal, works – all shades of pink. As a child of artistic intellectuals, pink was shunned, pink was kitsch. Okret’s rebellious nature escorts her throughout her artistic timeline in purposeful use of this eschewed color. The artist calls this installation “The Pink Line”. The line reverts us back not just to a timeline but to the line of the horizon, the line of landscape and ironically, the international date line which was once proposed to run through Paris and, indeed, was referred to as the Pink Line. Says Okret, “Like walking a tight rope, (the pink line is) a life-line, juggling thoughts, understanding that life is complicated but there is harmony if we keep faithful to our own line of philosophy.” We have an artist coming to grips with reality and the universal perception of birth, of biography, of creation, of time, of understanding a “verisimilitude” of reality.
Audrey Sklar Levy, (from the curator's text of the exhibition)
Tender Moment, by poet Gopika Dahanukar
We are walking away from who we are,
while we are moving towards who we know we are
We are finding no space to breathe in the chaos,
while we are holding chaos lovingly with our breath
We are not knowing where we are going,
while we are trusting a place known to us
We are lost in finding what art is,
while we are found in ourselves being lost
