An Ocean of Being: The Art of Tal Eshed by Mitra Khorashesh
from Dive In… Catalog July, 2016
“Everything is a symbol, every molecule contains the handwriting of the universe…and art, the expression of all symbols, ought to be an idealized drama, summarizing and annulling the naturalistic representations whose deeper meanings are found in the soul of the poet.” ---Téodor de Wyzewa
In this transient blink of an eye we call life, the fleeting moment of earthly existence, we choose to pursue the ephemeral rather than the eternal, the physical rather than the mental, selfish desire rather than compassion. And, while we do not know where we come from and we do not know to where we go, we search and search for answers to this, roaming through life like a thirsty caravan through the desert. We search for Truth, existential questioning, what is Real, why are we here, we search for purpose, for Essence. We turn to science, we put life under the microscope. We rationalize, oblivious to all the answers that are already within. Yet beneath the rational layers of the conscious mind lies an entirely distinct and much more powerful awareness: the subconscious. Thousands of years of history and knowledge have accrued, yet humanity still struggles to connect to the self; the subconscious has remained a mystery for centuries. Denying its existence is no longer a luxury science affords us. The ancients would claim it as the force that guides us, lights our path and knows all by being connected to infinite intelligence, only if we were capable of silencing our conscious minds to be able to listen.
The degree to which we are able to achieve true silence, would in turn allow the innermost self to shine through. Achieving this silence, true silence, to connect first to the self and then to the universe, is the contemplative artistic path that Tal Eshed has chosen to take with her form of expression.
Through a combination of light, sound, video, and sculpture, Eshed creates immersive installations that invite viewers into her phantasmagorical world, a world where unicorns meander, birds swim, and fish fly. Diverse visual and sensory elements are utilized to engage visitors in a full bodily experience where the haptic, tactic, visual, and auditory senses intertwine. Lights flicker, sounds echo, time freezes. All fades into stillness. Day meets night. Matter meets the ethereal. The spiritual and the earthly collide. Fantasy meets reality. Surreal yet picturesque, tangible yet fragile, personal yet universal, otherworldly, presence, consciousness, substance, spirit, hope. Throughout the course of an artistic career that spans nearly twenty years, Eshed has imagined a dream world that
explores the corporeal and the spiritual. Through an esoteric lens, her universe strives to unravel the essence of life, melding aspects of body and soul together. Her practice explores the duality between the physical and spiritual realms, while considering notions of perception, separation and unity, transformation, death and regeneration—reoccurring themes that pervade much of her oeuvre—bringing forth aspects of the unknown, the bewildering, the invisible. Intertwining myth with reality, faith with fable, a cosmos is pieced together through bits of disturbing truths. While some are deliberately disturbing, others are phantasmal, surreal, an abstract sphere with broken narrative.
While Eshed has resisted an explicitly stylistic signature, certain reoccurring themes weave throughout her practice, most notably, the motif of water, the image of the body, and the varying presence or anonymity of the artist traceable in physical form. Navigating time and space, she instills a resilient awareness of temporal and spatial dimensions, often melting several temporal dimensions simultaneously: past, present, and future, while drawing from philosophical doctrines from both East and West. Her narrative does not provide answers, but rather incepts questions while providing a contemplative setting where one is left to dive within.
The exhibition Dive In… reflects the culminated essence of Eshed’s artistic practice and who she is. Expanding on themes of regeneration and transformation, Water again takes the center stage within this recent body of work. Water, which Eshed identifies within her Hebrew name; Tal, meaning “morning dew”, and Eshed, meaning “waterfall”, is the means by which this alchemy takes place. Furthermore, water acts as a sacred element for Eshed, who’s name in Sanskrit translates to rhythm. Earth, fire, water and air amalgamate, each element symbolically significant within this harmonic stage, every element an autonomous part within a whole. The sea, the site and cause of multiple transformations, figures prominently in the video Sunrise Transformation. Here, a sexless figure sits in the lotus position as the sun rises and bathes everything with light; transforming darkness into bright, cool into warmth, from dusk to dawn. An elegant stillness is created, yet there is movement within this stillness. The only consistent thing in each passing moment is the now. A strange figure, a presence; remains in total solitude, silence, motionless. The sounds of each breathe and heartbeat dance together, as origami swans cross the ocean of being.
Echoing the posture and stillness of Sunrise Transformation is a performance piece in which Eshed invites the viewer to participate in, to dive into meditation with her and explore the timelessness of the present moment. Wearing a bodysuit that completely encapsulates and shields, Eshed trans- forms herself into a genderless, featureless entity, sitting in a lotus position within the installation for a duration of one hour, simply breathing. Video, sound, and light bounce, surrounding and echoing her formless form. Seven additional suits hang in unison, the audience is encouraged to witness her in meditation as a slice of eternity in the now, and to don a suit too and join the meditative performance practice. With eyes covered, every inch of the body captured, the viewer is forced to journey within the self, connecting to every breath, forced to be in the now. As Eshed meditates and becomes one with the space, with the audience, and with the city, the country, and the earth and universe around her, the microcosmic is transformed into the macrocosmic; the body becomes a vehicle, what is larger than life is reflected in the infinitesimal of the gallery and in Eshed herself. Eshed writes: “This is an invitation to us humans to become more aware of what we all share with one another rather than what separates us from each other. What we all experience in the core of existence, in the very essence of our being, the place that connects us all to the heart, to feelings, emotions, energies in motion, is a direct connection to the source of light.”
A light sculpture appears as the heart of the installation. Hovering above is a mobile of the universe, balancing the earth, sky, and water elements that appear elsewhere within the atmosphere created, reminding us of the alchemy of transformation from physical to spiritual, and of the energies that inhabit both realms of heaven and earth. While Eshed’s practice is a meditative method and a form of internal processing and transformation, the viewer’s subjectivity is always crucial: positioned as an active reader or decoder of image and signs, positioned to be critical, and most significantly; positioned to have an ephemeral experience within the installation. While many media environments can overwhelm and inundate our senses with input as they endlessly compete for our attention, Eshed creates a serene contemplative atmosphere, which allows us to make ‘sense’ of our lived experiences and transformative moments. Her installations invite the audience into an enchanted space, a space Eshed refers to as “a space between life and death”—to explore the invisible world of the wonders of the human body, the world of the spirits and mysticism, and the very wonders of Creation itself.
In Art as Therapy, Alain de Botton theorized his quintessential argument that, “art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.” Nearly a century before, Kandinsky revealed his deepest meditations on the spiritual in art, as an authentic or “internal necessity or spiritual impulse” that motivates artists to create. The Surrealists adopted art as a pathway to unconscious truths, the Symbolists utilized art as a Renaissance for humanity. The insights gained from decades of mining the subconscious have revealed arts significance as a conduit or vessel to the unseen world. Considering the spiritual in art in our digital age, one is able to delve into a collective heritage and theosophical aesthetic, the esoteric genre reminds us that Art is our oldest and most effective tool for transcendence and Unity. Spirituality has had a long history in artistic practice, most of which have placed a significant importance on the ability of the artist to disconnect from reality and unearth new ways of seeing. The techniques used to achieve this goal have varied from meditation, deprivation, sensory overload, dance, music, sexual activity and in some cases experiments with hallucinogenic substances, in order to reach a transcendental unconsciousness, the artistic vision. Tal Eshed’s art looks inside the desert of self, to reveal the ocean of being.
Water Transformation, 2014
Portrait - video projection installation
Dive In... catalog Front Cover Image
photo by: Zoran Trifunovic