Ruth Shouval and Yizhak Elyashiv - Memory Land
Barbara Davis Gallery is pleased to announce Memory Land, a two-person exhibition featuring Yizhak Elyashiv and Ruth Shouval. Both artists are originally from Jerusalem, Israel, studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and received their Masters' from Rhode Island School of Design. Ruth Shouval became member of CE RISD faculty in1996 and remained until 2015, she has been living and working in Houston for the past 17 years. Yizhak Elyashiv currently lives in Rhode Island and began teaching at RISD in 1995 and has been a member of RISD's faculty since 2001.
The artist reception opens tonight, Friday, May 20, from 6:30-8:30pm. This exhibition is on view through July 2, 2022.
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Yizhak Elyashiv, Untitled, 2022, ink on paper, 96 x 120 inches |
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Yizhak Elyashiv is interested in exploring traces of adaptation that are left upon the landscape. As an immigrant and traveler, he is familiar with the process of adjusting one’s self to a new place. His artistic approach and interactions with the landscape are like those taken by a farmer or a settler, they are homage to and a metaphor for the state of survival. In these new series of works the artist explores a dissection of images taken from the landscape documenting its relationship to memory, place and history. During the process the artist transfers and embeds onto the plates and cut strips of paper, dissecting the image and its flow, breaking its path and fields inside the landscape. Elyashiv truly performs an act of drawing from observation combined with the conceptual processes of gesture, measurement, and mapping. Some of the prints and drawings include activities and movements that are imported onto the landscape: text, counting systems, tracking time, stitching, piercing, embossing and other actions. By transferring these activities onto the observed field, the artist becomes a participant in the shaping and molding of a place.
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Ruth Shouval, Transformed Square, 2022, monoprint,144 x 32 inches
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Ruth Shouval utilizes the symbols of the square and the chair in her new series. The artist makes use of these symbols as a way to illustrate patterns of life, in a way that is at once contemplative and profound. The square as symbol represents balance and structure while giving a sense of order. It is connected to the laws of nature that exist in the physical realm, and how those laws give us a sense of predictability and security. She allows the work to transform and evolve beyond her control. Shouval deliberately seeks ways to let the process occur organically, while simultaneously avoiding complete spontaneity. This intricate balance between restraint and release is unveiled through her recurring subject matter, as the squares appear to gradually drift and disperse throughout the exhibition.
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About the Artists:
Ruth Shouval lives and works in Houston, Texas. She studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem, and received her MAE from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1996. She became a member of the CE RISD faculty in 1996 and remained there until 2015. In 2012, she was selected to participate in PrintHouston Next, a national biennial of contemporary print juried by Dena Woodall, curator of prints and drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH). Shouval's exhibitions include the Washington Printmakers Gallery (Washington, DC) and Barbara Davis Gallery (Houston, TX), amongst others. Her public art installations include the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence and the Kolter Elementary School in Houston. She was recently awarded first place at PrintTX 2015, a juried biennial exhibition in Houston and in 2017 received a Joanne Mitchell Emergency Grant.
Yizhak Elyashiv received a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in 1990 and MFA from RISD in 1992. He began teaching art at Rhode Island College in 1995 and has been a member of RISD’s faculty since 2001. Elyashiv’s prints and drawings have been exhibited and collected by the Israel Museum, British Museum, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Yale University Art Gallery, RISD Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art and Cleveland Museum of Art, among others. He has earned numerous grants and fellowships, including a MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation in 2007, a Howard Foundation fellowship for visual arts (Brown University) in 2007 and a drawing and printmaking fellowship from the RI State Council on the Arts in 2011. His prints have been published by the Tamarind Institute, Island Press, Washington University at St. Louis and Wildwood Press.
