Installation Photography: Youval Hai

Curator's text:

In the installation "So much forest”, a naked forest is contained within the gallery walls. The forest is composed of large-scale collage pieces that combine fragments of body and landscape, echoing each other in the room and forming a more complex whole than the sum of its parts - the forest.

The installation's roots, trees, branches, and barks go through deconstruction, reconstruction, and repetitiveness, borrowing from the human body and the mythical body of the forest image, which have inspired fantasies and dread in humans for decades.
The forest is composed of many items confined in a defined area and blends into a whole system of forests, breathing and beating like one dismembered body. Reuven's forest grew within the physical body and into the gallery's space, spreading into the reality outside of it.

A central figure in the forest is the barn owl, representing in different cultures the approaching death and both positive and negative illusions and hallucinations. In the installation, the barn owl appears as part of the forest - she is assimilated into it, emerges from it, hiding within, but is also present as an individual entity.
The barn-owl and the forest embody the hyper-sensitive person syndrome Reuven experiences with. In this state, the perception of physical, emotional, and social stimuli is being amplified, leading to a feeling of sensory overload when facing the external world.
The installation “So Much Forest” is an emotional and physical site, in which Reuven leads the viewer through the tangle of real and imagined experiences into a new experience, the artistic experience.