Leor Grady, who was born in Israel to Yemeni parents inserts his own personal narrative into artwork that explore themes of home and identify politics. The artist tackles these complex themes by documenting and re-presenting minute details and every day objects in an interdisciplinary practice that comprises video, photography and site-responsive installation. This discussion will address Grady’s latest work in progress, I am my Beloved’s and My Beloved is Mine, a series of three installations that extracts elements from the artist’s Yemeni-Jewish heritage by applying folk craft techniques to create a visual vocabulary that interprets every day lived reality and translates it into art. By unhinging the quotidian and confronting the viewer with the ordinariness of objects and minor archives, Grady reconfigures the viewer’s understanding of the world around her, and her relationship to the submerged structures of power and systems of control that are implicated in producing those histories.
Leor Grady is an Israeli-born visual artist, working and living in NYC. Interdisciplinary in nature, his site-specific works explore themes of home and identity politics. Through drawing, installation, and video art, he subversively repositions everyday objects, concepts and experiences to imbue them with poetic meaning. The materials and techniques he uses are for the most part simple and basic. The works created are reflective environments within which he can explore the dynamics of the personal and the public, between an individual and another. His work has been shown in the US and abroad, at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, Haifa Museum of Arts, Rush Arts Gallery, Exit Art, Y Gallery and The Center for Book Arts in New York City, as well as in public and private collections and in various publications.
Date + Time
Sunday, October 28
1pm
Location
The Main Gallery
51 Bergen St.