In her solo exhibition A Document of a Passing Moment, Noa Yekutieli explores the riches and pitfalls of personal and collective memory. Starting with an objective image of a landscape, the scene becomes a reflexive personal memory quest as it is carefully divided, deconstructed, and re-organized in a way that re-creates the landscape in our mind’s eye, that is, in our memory. In her manual paper cutting work, Yekutieli pulls from specific moments that shape a subjectivity as part of the collective experience.The paper-cuts constitute the remains of the memories chosen to be preserved, edited, and enhanced. Additionally, images are imposed within the frame of other images to illustrate our floating memories that are triggered by seemingly disparate people and places. The legibility of memories is constituted by our ability to make the transformation between our interior and exterior worlds. As images of memories develop in our mind, there are often holes or repressed details that are accounted for in the negative space of the artist’s cut paper. Within the realm of memory, warm feelings of sentimentality and nostalgia are often buttressed against dire feelings of heartbreak, loss, and longing. The exhibition is ultimately a meditation on how memory is constructed so as to confront the present and future with a more complex understanding of our past.
