About the artist
Introduction
by Haim Sokol
by Haim Sokol
A thing is space beyond
which there is no thing
Joseph Brodsky, Still Life
Sculpture would be the embodiment of places.
Places, in preserving and opening a region,
hold something free gathered around them which
grants the tarrying of things under consideration
and a dwelling for man in the midst of things.
M. Heidegger, Art and Space
In Jewish religious schools, when a child starts learning how to read, he is given a lick of honey smeared on the alphabet. This forms a special sensory memory that preserves emotions and feelings. Julia Segal has never attended a Jewish school. Her gift of rememberance
through feelings is innate. Such kind of memory is extremely active — the slightest impulse, touch, smell, taste, or even a mere glance at a random object can be enough to stir up a storm of memories. These remembrances are of moods, of emotional upheavals and of inner experiences that are more copious in human life than memories of concrete dates and events. To transmit, articulate, or simply to retell
these experiences is extremely hard. It requires the novel’s bredth and scale, the multi-dimensionality of film, or the totality of an art installation. Julia Segal has achieved this expression through the limited set of tools that figurative sculpture provides: material, form, volume, and narrative.
Segal’s works are, for the most part, monochrome: the gray of the concrete, of rain gutters and of old asphalt. This produces an almost tactile sensation of an object emerging out of the wall’s surface. It is no coincidence that the artist’s favorite format is sculptural relief. Relief is unevenness, roughness, protuberance on the surface (no matter if the surface is horizontal or vertical). One can feel it with one’s hands. Segal’s sculptures are extremely tactile. Even the surface of her material is always uneven, as rough as a calloused hand or a brick wall. This amplifies the already enormous internal pressure that form imparts on the material surface. It’s as if the molecular bonds are about to break apart, releasing that pressure and leaving matter behind, like old skin. Sensing this tension, Segal begins to make cuts in her reliefs, cutting out windows and doors. One could say that she creates light inside them. The relief acquires volume, and with it a new space is born.
Thus come to life the recollected worlds of Julia Segal. They are always small-scale, as if we grew up, and they’ve stayed the same. That is why you can peek inside, take them with your hands, put them on the table. Every piece by Segal is a thing in itself, or more precisely, the Object. Jean Baudrillard wrote, “The object is that through which we mourn for ourselves, in the sense that, in so far as we truly possess it, the object stands for our own death, symbolically transcended... “ Julia Segal creates metonymic portraits. Objects instead of people — an old coat, a wheelchair, a child’s table. But her objects are not anthropomorphic (or, more precisely, they are anthropomorphic to the extent that that an old object repeats the figure of its owner).
Segal recreates in detail the real things, as if reclaiming them back from time itself. However, these objects are someone else’s. And if one’s own object allows for at least a symbolic transcendance of death, then someone else’s, on the contrary, painfully highlights
its presence. Thus the artist reveals the emptiness that is formed in space and time with the departure
of each person. And this emptiness resounds with a “voice of gentle silence*.”
Haim Sokol
which there is no thing
Joseph Brodsky, Still Life
Sculpture would be the embodiment of places.
Places, in preserving and opening a region,
hold something free gathered around them which
grants the tarrying of things under consideration
and a dwelling for man in the midst of things.
M. Heidegger, Art and Space
In Jewish religious schools, when a child starts learning how to read, he is given a lick of honey smeared on the alphabet. This forms a special sensory memory that preserves emotions and feelings. Julia Segal has never attended a Jewish school. Her gift of rememberance
through feelings is innate. Such kind of memory is extremely active — the slightest impulse, touch, smell, taste, or even a mere glance at a random object can be enough to stir up a storm of memories. These remembrances are of moods, of emotional upheavals and of inner experiences that are more copious in human life than memories of concrete dates and events. To transmit, articulate, or simply to retell
these experiences is extremely hard. It requires the novel’s bredth and scale, the multi-dimensionality of film, or the totality of an art installation. Julia Segal has achieved this expression through the limited set of tools that figurative sculpture provides: material, form, volume, and narrative.
Segal’s works are, for the most part, monochrome: the gray of the concrete, of rain gutters and of old asphalt. This produces an almost tactile sensation of an object emerging out of the wall’s surface. It is no coincidence that the artist’s favorite format is sculptural relief. Relief is unevenness, roughness, protuberance on the surface (no matter if the surface is horizontal or vertical). One can feel it with one’s hands. Segal’s sculptures are extremely tactile. Even the surface of her material is always uneven, as rough as a calloused hand or a brick wall. This amplifies the already enormous internal pressure that form imparts on the material surface. It’s as if the molecular bonds are about to break apart, releasing that pressure and leaving matter behind, like old skin. Sensing this tension, Segal begins to make cuts in her reliefs, cutting out windows and doors. One could say that she creates light inside them. The relief acquires volume, and with it a new space is born.
Thus come to life the recollected worlds of Julia Segal. They are always small-scale, as if we grew up, and they’ve stayed the same. That is why you can peek inside, take them with your hands, put them on the table. Every piece by Segal is a thing in itself, or more precisely, the Object. Jean Baudrillard wrote, “The object is that through which we mourn for ourselves, in the sense that, in so far as we truly possess it, the object stands for our own death, symbolically transcended... “ Julia Segal creates metonymic portraits. Objects instead of people — an old coat, a wheelchair, a child’s table. But her objects are not anthropomorphic (or, more precisely, they are anthropomorphic to the extent that that an old object repeats the figure of its owner).
Segal recreates in detail the real things, as if reclaiming them back from time itself. However, these objects are someone else’s. And if one’s own object allows for at least a symbolic transcendance of death, then someone else’s, on the contrary, painfully highlights
its presence. Thus the artist reveals the emptiness that is formed in space and time with the departure
of each person. And this emptiness resounds with a “voice of gentle silence*.”
Haim Sokol
