Gershon Kreimer

Artist Statement

In my search for visual forms, I consolidate the exchange between my personal gaze as an artist, and the narrative contained within the subject. What I look for in this narrative is the representation of not only a catharsis, but also the revelation of a hidden identity. It is not the pose, product of training or repetition.

Starting with my first series Domesticities and Void, I concentrate on the body as a fundamental place where light, matter, and subject coalesce; inciting an disconcerting reaction in the viewer. This propelled me to further explore perception and its alterations in series like Distortions, Safe Images, Totems, and Blindness, where the abstracted subjects seem to acquire an almost cultic presence. Veils proposes form as the censoring of identity and body in different instances, as an aesthetic of censorship.

My method is simple: to stimulate irrationality in gestures, in pauses, and in poses. It is almost the same process as with a performance, but above all, it is the final result of automatism. The pauses in my latest installments of Void reflect the absence of control or its natural opposite; control in its most extreme. The results are surprising not only for the camera but also for the subject. By approaching nudity as a narrative of abstraction, this process ideally brings us to a point at which the lack of control produces a nil in sense and in language: A point in which the body is a sign of itself and nothing more.

Instantaneous videos like Untitled and Integration/Disintegration present an instance where stillness and movement explore the absence and presence of the body. The manipulated body becomes an abstract loop without beginning, middle, or end. In Times Like These, I turn the body into a historical allegory that reflects my personal anxieties. These anxieties have also taken me to reflect on other extremes.

It is in No place, but here I am, that I enter a different perception of time and space within the more solitary environment of skulls and psychiatric prescription pills. The gaze upon the body gradually loses its human form, finding equally personal forms in a new narrative of the inanimate. In these simple still-lifes, I would like to understand that the temporality of life is not exhausted in the contours of the body, and even less so in its memory. It constitutes the beginning of a process whose end we are yet to discover.

www.gershonkreimer.com