Yizhak Elyashiv: Virtual Landscape

When I first arrived in Ireland for my first (of what would become many) artist residencies, I was immediately captivated by the drama of the living past on the landscape. The beauty of the fields, the ever-changing weather that enveloped them, the people who lived and died working them, and the people who left and now only imagine them, alchemized in me. With each visit to County Mayo and as my understanding of Irish culture grew, magnetic qualities of “place,” specifically this place, slowly found their way into my work.

Landscape” is about observing and documenting the relationship between landscape and memory, place and history. Human activity over time has shaped the landscape in ways that are not always obvious. Time, weather, and fleeting innovation erases what was once present. Although signs of this long record of human activity are not often immediately visible, through visual and physical excavation I come to see and to connect with a place's past.

​I am specifically interested in acts of adaptation. As an immigrant and traveler, I am familiar with the process of adjusting one’s self to a new place. The actions people take when a familiar environment becomes unfamiliar through disaster, or when an unfamiliar place becomes home through migration and immigration, mold and meld the physical world, pulling the cultural along behind. Natural blights leading to an economic disaster, personal loss of life, families torn apart - these acts of adaptation leave a record. The work will explore traces of adaptation that are left upon the landscape.

​In the work, the act of drawing from observation combines with a conceptual processes of measurement and mapping. Some of the finished prints and drawings include activities and movements that I have imported into the landscape: words, names, texts, counting systems, gestures and more. Importing my actions onto the observed field makes me an equal participant in the shaping and molding of the place. 

​ YIZHAK ELYASHIV