ALONG THE BREAK

The “Syrian-African break” is the Hebrew name for the Great Rift Valley, a topographic phenomenon caused 35 million years ago by movement of tectonic plates and crosses contemporary Israel from its northernmost point to its southern tip in Eilat. En route, It carves out the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. It also shapes the physical borders of Israel; with Lebanon and Syria in the north, with Jordan along the eastern front and with Egypt in the south. This personal journey along Route 90 offers a poetic framework. I confined myself to the geographic boundaries of the phenomenon, while confronting the “break” as a metaphor of the ideological and social crisis that this local landscape represents; The minefields of the Golan Heights, the empty communal kibbutz dining hall, an abandoned resort to the dry shores of the Dead Sea and the watchtowers scattered throughout the landscape. Using a large format camera, I reorganize the materials of reality into an alternative entity and transform the relics into monuments, pictorial and provoking, yet tinged with irony and underlying ideological tones. I wish to create an ongoing dialogue between the everyday and the sublime. The physical and metaphorical journey is a main theme in my work. I take the idea of the American photographic road trip, the endless roads and vast open spaces and import that notion into the small, restricted, Israeli landscape.