Lee Yanor | Come Dance with Me

Lee Yanor | Come Dance with Me
Opening Reception: Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012
Text by: Ktzia Alon

In Lee Yanor’s current exhibition at Zemack Gallery, the contents of her world are refracted in a versatile display, owing between diverse media. Several artistic genres whirl together in the exhibition space, all marked by the artist’s personal, unique handwriting. Lee Yanor – a photographer, director, visual artist, choreographer, videographer, cinematographer – works with familiar cultural materials but twists and turns them, engaging in an intense dialogue with conventional, hackneyed generic classications such as “photography” or “video.” Between and through the various practices, a thematic aesthetics emerges: an aesthetics of disappearance (to quote the title of Paul Virilio’s 1980 treatise).
A gure blurred by light seems to fade into the void. The chiaroscuro cascading from it makes it part of another reality. Endless vulnerability emanates from it (Marianne, 2011). Two gures move in a silver- ake storm, implanted in a dream-like space, tracing the boundaries of being (video still from Come Dance with Me, 2011). A couple oats in the material fullness of water, fully dressed in ordinary clothes – unsuited for water – which fall away from their bodies and are lifted off them, creating a colorful train (video still from As Far as I Can See, 2011). A man struggles with a table, or metaphorically, with the objects surrounding him, which keep striving to make him “one of them,” until they nally succeed (Man & Table, 2011). A bright transparent light trails through the tassels, emitted out of thick darkness (video still from Come Dance with Me).
She seems to use beauty to deride transcendental horror, and her works are situated along the teeming line that stretches between phenomenology and transcendence, reaching for a phenomenology of the invisible. A cornucopia of formal elements, inundating the atmosphere. A man, a woman, a body, a memory, drawing near, moving apart. Snakes of lost memories slowly crawl, returning to us from a great distance, reminding us they have never quite disappeared. “Francesca,” “Dominique,” we mumble, feeling as if we have known them for a very long time, for years and years. There they are, returning to us, quite real, esh and blood, closer than ever.
One image follows another, hypnotizing images grasp us, stretch our gaze as it longs for more and more. A movement slides along the curve of a hand, a couple oats in the air, before and after the jump. One gaze randomly falls on another. A whole range of emotions is laid at our feet, lays a warm hand on our hearts, makes us part of this visual vertigo.
The knowledge of pure beauty is pierced by a scalpel. Come dance with me – rm and valid, the invitation hangs in the air until its recipient responds, until we respond. Come dance with me.