Offering

Projected onto a panoramic screen using three projectors, the film presents a cyclical journey that begins with an intimate depiction of a matador being dressed for a bullfight by his armour bearer. This ritualistic procedure takes place in a small, sparsely furnished room and is meticulously executed, almost choreographed. The film moves on to slowly navigate through the architectural spaces of a solitary Corrida and then to the physical encounter between man and beast. Finally, the film returns to the small room of the opening sequence and shows the matador undressing at the end of the fight. The film aims to depict, with meticulous attention to detail, an intense and private encounter between culture and the sublime, between a matador and a bull, between life and mortality. It is intended to produce an effect that is psychologically penetrating, and that reveals the carnal affection and sensual affinities between man and beast. I aim to avoid taking a moral stand, but to converse with a long painterly tradition of religious iconography. Through contemporary and historical juxtapositions – the film includes depictions of Old Master paintings - I seek to create a timeless space, a space that cannot be anchored, a space that hangs between past and present, between art history and contemporary practice. Offering forms part of my ongoing series of moving portraits. These include Evaders (2009) and Will You Dance For Me (2011). All three films aim to depict the existential experience of single individuals who occupy a space that is both performative and biographical

Floating World

Central to my work is an examination of the evolving nature of the camera. Traditionally a device that recorded what was in front of it, it has now become something that creates our world rather than documents it. Since the digital revolution the speed of information transmission has compressed both time and space. We can now immediately see images of events as they are happening on the other side of the world, and the technology that makes this possible is now available to millions more people than ever before. This has profound implications for how we see and experience what is outside of us. Nothing remains fixed for long; everything is in flux. Where does reality occur? In November 2015 I visited Japan and photographed the Zen gardens located in and around Kyoto. Created to reflect the essence of nature, not its actual appearance, and as aids to meditation, these gardens are self-contained worlds within the wider world. They are both real and metaphysical places, where time stands still. For me they not only represent an alternative to our image saturated ‘world in flux’, but they are also symbolic of a physical and spiritual displacement that resonates with his personal history. They are places that hover between a utopian ideal and an everyday reality. Within Kyoto’s Zen gardens I chose particular places to photograph where natural forms are reflected in water. During the post-production process, in an attempt to perfectly integrate the reflection with the reflected objects - what he calls the virtual with the material - Gersht inverted his photographs and fused them to create new spaces that hover between material and virtual realities. The resulting photographic prints are fundamentally dependent on something that exists in the physical world, but because of the melting together of tangible reality and its reflection, they are not literal depictions of it. We are presented with the absence of the object of representation. The photograph becomes the thing that exists, an image of the folding of space and time. In Buddhism there is a parable concerning the wind on the water. When a gentle wind disturbs the still surface of the water in a pool the reflections on it are broken into shimmering patterns. The world seen reflected on the surface becomes a fractured image. The viewer becomes lost in the complexities of the reflection and it is only when the wind drops and the pool becomes still again that it is possible to discern what lies beneath the surface of the water. By interleaving space and time in his Floating World photographs Gersht exaggerates the disturbed appearance of reality’s surface, just as the wind does the surface of the water, and invites us to think about what is beyond, behind, and within it

On Reflection

The mirrors in On Reflection reflect what appear to be still-life paintings by Jan Brueghel, but the images are illusions—not only because they are mediated by mirrors, but also because each reflection is not of a painting but of a replica, featuring artificial flowers meticulously crafted by hand. The three replicas that I created, each based on a different Breughel bouquet, are comments on the nature of the original paintings, in which Brueghel chose not to depict wild flowers but blossoms that were the result of a sophisticated horticultural intervention by man. The depiction of the simultaneous perfection of so many species that bloom in different seasons and in far flung geographically locations—a fantasy of a desirable, but never attainable reality—is an assertion of the power of art and craft, alongside the power of science and technology, to remake the world of objects. In contrast to the laborious and meticulous processes that led to the creation of the replicas of the bouquets in Brueghel’s paintings, the compositions that were captured by the film camera at the instant of the mirrors shattered were rapid and unpredictable. The use of the two cameras allowed me to record simultaneously two contrasting views of the same event. One focused close up on the glass surface of the mirror, the other—from at a distance of three meters—on the reflection in the mirror of the vase of flowers. Because of the different focusing points and the limited depth of field, each camera captured an alternative reality, questioning the relationship between photography and a single objective truth. In the film I combined the two point of views, integrating the virtual images of the reflections with the physical presence of sharp the shutting glass. The final photographic prints simultaneously embrace rigorous and painstaking craft and the mechanical instantaneousness of the digital camera. In them, I raises the question of whether the camera records, or creates, reality

Haptic Aesthetics and Bodily Properties of Ori Gersht’s Digital Art: A Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Study.

Experimental aesthetics has shed light on the involvement of pre-motor areas in the perception of abstract art. However, the contribution of texture perception to aesthetic experience is still understudied. We hypothesized that digital screen-based art, despite its immateriality, might suggest potential sensorimotor stimulation. Original born-digital works of art were selected and manipulated by the artist himself. Five behavioral parameters: Beauty, Liking, Touch, Proximity, and Movement, were investigated under four experimental conditions: Resolution (high/low), and Magnitude (Entire image/detail). These were expected to modulate the quantity of material and textural information afforded by the image. While the Detail condition afforded less content-related information, our results show that it augmented the image’s haptic appeal. High Resolution improved the haptic and aesthetic properties of the images. Furthermore, aesthetic ratings positively correlated with sensorimotor ratings. Our results demonstrate a strict relation between the aesthetic and sensorimotor/haptic qualities of the images, empirically establishing a relationship between beholders’ bodily involvement and their aesthetic judgment of visual works of art. In addition, we found that beholders’ oculomotor behavior is selectively modulated by the perceptual manipulations being performed. The eye-tracking results indicate that the observation of the Entire, original images is the only condition in which the latency of the first fixation is shorter when participants gaze to the left side of the images. These results thus demonstrate the existence of a left-side bias during the observation of digital works of art, in particular, while participants are observing their original version

Evaders

Evaders portrays a journey traversing the legendary Lister Route through the Pyrenees across the French/Spanish border. The passage is surrounded by exquisitely beautiful and severe vistas, with extreme elemental conditions: locals claim the 'Transmontana' wind can make travellers go mad. The making of this film was itself an expedition, with unanticipated environmental phenomena influencing the process. With my small crew we retraced the path taken by Walter Benjamin during his escape from Nazi-occupied France (and by many others fleeing Nazism). With its harsh conditions and tragic history, the route has come to symbolize a border between life and death itself. The film does not attempt to portray Benjamin or his journey in a literal sense. Instead it explores a primal struggle between a solitary individual and the elements, set in a nonspecific time. It was visually inspired by Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus, referenced in Benjamin's final essay 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'. This tragic image of an angel battling the elements, attempting to cross a border or, as Benjamin suggests, to return to the past in a helpless desire to resurrect what has been smashed, is at the core of the film. The visual references to German Romanticism suggest a fatal attachment to German culture that prevented Benjamin and others from seeing clearly the terrible truth of the Nazi project until it was too late to escape its consequences. In the film the traveller is hopelessly moving through the romantic landscape attempting to free himself from the physical and cultural burdens that are embedded in this sublime environment, preventing him from reaching a new horizon. The production was supported by the Arts Council, UCA, CRG Gallery, New York, Mummery & Schnelle Gallery, London, Angles Gallery, Los Angeles and Neoga Gallery, Tel Aviv

Hide & seek

The photographs in the series Hide and Seek depict hidden swamps and marshes located in the remnants, on the borders of Poland and Belarus, of the vast primeval forests that once covered most of Europe. Gersht was seeking locations that, at times of political conflict, were used as places of refuge. Hide and Seek attempts to explore the dialectic between metaphysical and real places. Photography can only depict the reality that is physically present in front of the lens, and Gersht was interested in finding places to photograph that do not, or did not, exist on any map and that therefore may be referred to as ‘non-places’ or voids

Salted Drops

Commissioned by: Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany. A single water drop is falling in extreme slow motion through space toward its collision with the water surface, which reflects two portraits by the 17th century artist Govert Flinck. On impact, a chain reaction is triggered and the portraits become animated, appearing to breath, mutate and change personality, as if springing back to life. It is as if the impact of the collision transforms memory and manifests it as a tangible trace, turning the past into the lived present, compressing history and time. At one point the camera shifts its focus and looks in extreme close up directly through the slowly falling drop of water. Trapped inside the drop that function like an ephemeral crystal lens, is the sharp image of the portrayed woman and together they travel through space towards the inescapable collision with the surface of the water. On impact the drop disappears, initially drowned in the water before slowly reemerging and springing up into the air, as if defying gravity and trying to escape its inevitable destiny. The work, entitled Salted Drops, emanates a meditative melancholic atmosphere, suggesting a metaphor for the comprehensive work of mourning. At the same time, a fictitious, artificial dialogue is spun between Flinck’s self-portrait and the portrait of an unknown lady, providing shimmering insights into the intensely charged relationship between the painter and the model. The film was captured by a high speed camera at a frame rate of 2500 fps, revealing events that were occurring in the folds of time. In this work that was commissioned by the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany, for a surevay exhibition of Gover Flink’s work at his native town on his 400 anniversary, I was attempting to establish a dialogue between past and present, between art history and and technology. Therefore I chose to use cutting edge technologies to capture a world that was unavailable to Flink and his contemporaries. I was conceving the drop as an optical device and was drawing analogy between the 17th century and contemporary life, between the, the area of the microscope and the telescope and virtual world of the digital revolution. In doing so, I was attempting to explore the relationships between representation and truth

Ori Gersht: lost in time

Ori Gersht depicts scenes of natural beauty that perceptively disguise and reveal a history of violence. Featuring selections from a trilogy of works based on 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century European still-life painting, and two new series based on Japanese history and scenery, this exhibition represents five years of recent work by the artist. This is the first solo museum exhibition of work by the artist in the Western United States

Revelations: experiments in photography

From the 1840s, scientists were using photography to record and measure phenomena which lay beyond human vision. The beauty of these early images and the revolutionary techniques developed for scientific study, shaped the history of photography and heavily influenced modern and contemporary art photographers. Revelations showcased some of the earliest photographic images from the National Photography Collection by figures such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Eadweard Muybridge alongside striking works by modern and contemporary artists including Harold Edgerton and Hiroshi Sugimoto. On display for the very first time was an original photographic print of X-Ray, the earliest recorded images of the moon and 19th century photographs capturing the hidden beauty of electrical discharges

Artist book: Ori Gersht

This artists' book is composed of three volumes, each taking a separate Gersht film work as its subject; Evaders, Will You Dance For Me and Offering. All three film works disguise dark and complex themes beneath seductive or hypnotic imagery. Will You Dance For Me depicts an 85-year-old dancer swaying back and forth in a rocking chair, slowly recounting her experiences as a young woman in Auschwitz. Evaders explores Walter Bernjamin's ill fated escape from Nazi occupied France along the mountainous Lister Route. Offering presents a contemporary matador preparing for a bullfight and an expectant audience. These small and intimate books reflect on the creative thought process behind the making of each film. Together they create a seamless visual narrative and an insight into the mind of the artist. Each volume combines sources that have influenced Gersht including film stills, screen grabs, music videos and art historical paintings. From page to page they combine with Gersht’s own drawings, sketches, photographs and works from his wider portfolio that he considers relevant to these final film works. All of the images, original, found and sourced are treated equally and have been edited into sequences by the artist. The relationships between the images are not intended to be didactic but attempt to create a new experience from Gersht’s ideas and to contextualize his working process. Robert Rowland Smith, has written the accompanying softback text Gersht's Ghosts. The essay explores the themes of all three works and makes connections between the sourced, found and comparative images