Dear Mother,

There was this line that I read before sleep last night that felt so relatable. It was in the profile of Jesse Armstrong the creator of the show Succession; “One of the privileges of doing a show like this is that you are able to think about the world with some other smart people,” he told me. “Do you know that W. H. Auden quote—‘Poetry makes nothing happen’? To some extent, poetry can stand in for this kind of work as well. I don’t suppose it is going to have any direct influence on the world. But it is still a way of being in it, and feeling like you are part of it, instead of entirely being acted upon.”

This work is my way of participating. Prior, I was a photo editor for news and media companies and while it informed this work in many ways — I was not working from a place of intense creative engagement. I was catering to a mass audience with photographs meant to tell a story, or optimally, yet impossibly, to convey a truth - yet it was usually about metrics. My work is informed by this but also reflects the greater contemporary reality of constant photo taking, the breakdown of the boundaries between our virtual selves and our lived selves; our public and private selves, children’s consent. It is born out of thinking about our moments dictated by the camera (even more so than when this first became an issue in the 1920s) vs. lived, experienced, durational time.

My 3 young children feature heavily in my work, however obscured. I would not say my children are the subjects but moments and objects surrounding them are often the incidental, mundane details that i deal with. The “problems” I seek to work through are essentially:

1. What to do with this vast photo archive i have amassed (I am not alone in this practice!).

2. What is the proper place for this particular photo, this moment that I removed myself in order to capture, which I then stored into oblivion. Does this photo need to be seen? Am I hiding some of it (by zooming in or painting over, or cutting up as in my collages) because I am protecting privacy or because teasing out a moment is more effective (as Walter Benjamin says: “The semblance in which nothing appears is the more potent one, the authentic one.”). What is the final resting place for the gigabytes of food photos and baby rash photos meant for the pediatrician.

3. How do I live in a way that is closer to how we “endure” (Bergson), and less how we experience time with constant moment dividing, editing, etc.

My works are composites. They are (in most cases) photos with a layer of paint on top of them. This approach of painting one moment on top of another moment is satisfying as it extends the notion of fragmented time for me. I can focus on this one fleeting moment as I paint another moment. The bottom layer will be visible the more you sit with it, as the base image comes through the transparencies above it. As in the painting “Blue Shirt in the Living Room," at first glance it is a painting of a shirt, but at a closer look you see a kids pajama shirt rolled up on the floor near a nondescript IKEA chair.

Other works transpose these issues onto different media. For instance, one project I am working on asks Google to place my own photos which Ive transposed onto various stock and product images of archival photo supply (such as archival gloves) into google search results so that I have in effect created my own vision for Google Images (Photo below).

I would love Mother Gallery’s insight on this work. I love your gallery, the physcial space (though I have not yet seen the NYC one of course, congrats!) and the brilliant roster of artists. I hope this is only the start of our conversation.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Tzirel

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BFA Parsons 2004 - Dual Thesis Photography and Fine Art

Visiting Student Program/Year “Abroad” Columbia University 2005 - Poetry

Worked 10 long years as a Photo Editor

MFA School of Visual Arts - Art Practice 2016