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28/9/2007

Aharon Ozery

Galerie Davide Gallo, Berlin

The Egg Project

The Egg Project consists of a kinetic mechanical structure whose arms deliver egg-like objects from one location towards another within its perimeter, so that the delivery builds a circular movement, delicate and precise in the same time.

Ozery' s work is about breaking categories between what is considered mechanical and human. His Mother machine, nesting her eggs with utmost care, combines machine with human emotion pointing out that the relation may be fatally disturbed or could break the paradigmatic border we attach to them. Indeed, Ozery' s machine transcends itself into a human domain, as an automaton that discovers his own persona and therefore consciousness. A robotic being that made a quantum leap, broke the barrier and discovered its own soul. It-he-she is now a utopic construct.

The machine in its role as a care-taker, a symbolic mother if you will, creates a discontent as well as a fascination in the eyes of its observer because it corresponds in exact measure to the ambivalent relation our culture sustains with machines which is that of suspicion and admiration. The machine' s potential of self awareness makes the human a possible anachronism. Not only does the machine simile humanity, it aspires to be more than human - a better version, which frightens us.

The machine, Ozery builds contains therefore both mimesis and nemesis. It resembles other works he made where emphasis is put on circular action. The circularity of the machine, the loop of its action, the lack of its obvious goal builds the mythical matrix, the dreamscape in which it is enacted. There is a discrepancy between the functionality and industrial style of his structures and their purposeless actions. Like an Ouroboros which chases his own tail, his works are contained in a cosmos whose mythical dimension requires no justification and where each action is part of a ritual. Thus, his treatment of technology reminds us of what Hoelderlin saw as the growth of saving power.

Much of Ozery' s works is built on contradictions. That between sense and sensibility, between a technological world view and a mythical one, between what is female and what is male, and that which keeps machines and humans apart and because categories are broken they are also a possibility to view things from a new perspective. Ozery works in the tradition which combines art and technology and goes back to the cross disciplinary works of Leonardo da Vinci, the cogs and gears inventions of the renaissance, the Baroque engineered spectacles and the machine sculptures of the constructivists. Philip k. Dick asked whether androids dream of electric sheep. Ozery wants to know whether machines dream of babies.
Doreet Levitte Harten

Galerie Davide Gallo
Linienstrasse 156 - Berlin
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