The Return of the Pilgrim

Traces VI, The Sixth Biennale for Drawing in Israel, Jerusalem Print Workshop, 2016

Shay Zilberman’s point of departure is the place, the space. He models the space of a scholar, a romantic, and a collector. The site-specific paper installation in the current show, The Return of the Pilgrim, is tantamount to an inner nature creeping and swarming in a room at the Workshop facing east, toward the Temple Mount, the realm of sanctity, a millennia old place of pilgrimage. Zilberman operates like a paper pilgrim who extract and cuts existing images from magazines, periodicals, encyclopedias, and illustrated books, combining them by means of manual “Photoshop” and intervention in graphite and ink drawing to form hybrid, surrealistic landscapes—dreamlike scenery which holds the time and history of different places brought together. The books serve him as mediators of the world, and paper is the tool by which he creates life. In a collagist act that may be described as gardening, he “grows” a new landscape through the paper, at once nostalgic and disconcerting.

Curator: Irena Gordon