SHAI KREMER

New Normal

“Social distancing and isolation have led many of us to look for creative ways of coping temporarily with this new life. When I understood that I might not be able to go outside with my camera for a long time, I decided to dig in, peeking into the past: into my images archive. Back to the source of the pandemic: urbanism encroaching on nature, hence human-beings contacts with wild life. Over the years, I dealt a lot with the tension between built environment and nature. Photographic material I accumulated during the last two decades where the starting point of my exploration.”

The resulting images are deconstruction that leads towards abstraction. An enigmatic biological architectural tenor of our surroundings and times of polarized society.

In his series New Normal (2020), Kremer continues his long preoccupation with urban and nature, (starting in 2001 creating digital collages of the WTC construction site and later on dealing with Gentrification of Brooklyn all with multi layered images). This time he combined layers from his archive, articulating his visual process by using various blending techniques. Constructing hybrid visual that reads like poetry: Investigate the complex interrelationship between nature and the built environment. Placing the viewer in the gap between reality and futuristic fantasy, then bring it back to old familiar tones of sepia and cyanotype prints.

Motifs of the strait man made lines and the curvy shapes of nature are pushed to the foreground revealing a conflicted restless and tinted landscape. It looks like the world accelerate to much in the last few decades and suddenly one day it stopped. a regression in consumption and free movement for few month led us all wander what will be the new normal from now on.

“like many of us I felt I wanted to plant a tree inside my apartment, instead of digging a hole in the floor I dived into my archive. The challenge was to convert randomness and entropic chaos into hybrid and structured compositions.”