Noa Yekutieli

Where We Stand was part of a collaborative exhibition by artists Noa Yekutieli, Maria Saleh Mahameed, and Tsibi Geva titled 'Conscious Collective'. As a Japanese-American-Israeli Yekutieli attempts to capture the complexities of multicultural narratives that cannot be ascribed to binary categories. She utilizes odds - negative space and material, black and white to challenge singular perspectives, languages, and political approaches. For this exhibition, Yekutieli created a large-scale immersive wall installation that continues her body of work 'We Say It's the Nature of Things' which refers to “The Window to Reality,” a prompt often used by artists over time to examine artists’ surroundings. Formally, this approach requires applying a singular perspective that renders one person’s view as if they were standing in one place at one moment in time. The 65 unique windows comprising this installation do not adhere to a singular perspective, rather they depict a multiplicity of viewing points. As viewers approach the installation, the seemingly three-dimensional work will transition and become flat, exposing the two-dimensional patterns cut into the paper. Upon closer examination, the installation and the individual frames will change, slowly revealing that the natural landscape seen on the windows’ exteriors when they are “closed” blind the images of destruction, shown only when the windows are “opened.” The installation questions the human tendency to selectively open and close our eyes to reality, to camouflage and deny the truth as an act of a coping and survival mechanism. Specifically, Yekutieli wishes to challenge the structural facts through which we often view the political reality in Israel-Palestine. She decided to create a building with windows only and with no walls to represent a territory with no clear boundaries and borders. By visual illusion, Yekutieli asks the viewer to choose their point of view in a personal manner. Perhaps, in an ever-changing way that does not require an absolute standing point, contradicting the enduring need to define standing points through terms of black-white, right-wrong, and positive-negative.