A solo exhibition by Maya Shimony at Oranim Art Gallery in Israel.
Disruptions in the Supply Chain
A solo exhibition by Maya Shimony
Curated by: Orit Bulgaro
26 June - 20 August, 2022
Oranim Art Gallery, Israel
In Disruptions in the Supply Chain, Maya Shimony moves between Oranim Botanical Garden and the adjacent Art Gallery: the palm trees from the garden are brought inside as the conceptual and visual core of the exhibition, while outside, a freestanding wall at the heart of the botanical garden is transformed into a golden monolith. The movement between the two foci of the exhibition unravels the relationship and the hierarchy between them, realigning them as one continuous hybrid realm where the natural and the devised are inextricably intertwined.
The palm tree is a common natural element but also a fraught image, collapsing under the weight of its overused iterations. It carries many overlapping religious and cultural significances, and usually stands for the ultimate “elsewhere”: the ancient Near East or the exoticized sites and orientalist formulations of the so-called new world as “paradise” on earth. At the same time, the palm tree is also perhaps the most pervasive plant in the local urban and suburban landscape, found on every street corner, public park, private gardens, and along intercity roads. Here, it specifically serves as a tangible constant reminder of the biblical realm, a backdrop against which everyday life unfolds.
Inside Oranim Art Gallery, Maya Shimony creates a fantastical “palm hall” compressing the palm tree’s disparate manifestations with the specific trees she encountered during her residency at the botanical garden. The trees that were brought from different parts of the world to form a coherent, impossible, landscape are extracted from their habitat and reimagined as an enigmatic interior-exterior space that seems at odds with the vernacular.
On a central wall in the gallery, a gold leaf mural creates gleamers of light, like an afterimage of the light that pierces through the foliage, filling the space and enveloping the visitors. The almost abstract composition underscores the work process – meditative observation that records the fleeting moment while allowing oneself to get completely lost in the dark tangle.
The gold and the palm are similar in kind. They simultaneously evoke the natural and the artificial, the sublime, the kitsch, and the quotidian. On the one hand, trivial and all too familiar, a hackneyed cliché rooted in a local and specific history, and on the other hand, somehow always still mythical and universal. This is their inherent duality.
The exhibition extends into the botanical garden with Folly – a large freestanding wall covered completely with gold leaf at the edge of the wilder, forest like, area of the garden. Bookending the expanse, it cancels the separation between the art gallery and the botanical garden, rethinking the relationship between them. Its title, Folly, conjures the English Landscape Garden with its “Greek temples” or “ruins,” inlaid in these gardens alongside elements that emulated a natural landscape, like lakes and caves, to elicit contemplation and emotional experience. The golden wall, which reflects the visitors and undergoes a rapid and not unromantic process of deterioration throughout the exhibition, clearly also functions in a similar vein. But embedding this thoroughly alien element in the garden mainly does not allow us to forget that this seemingly authentic and wild-looking place is an orchestrated and designed image of nature.
Against this strangely foreign out of place visual world Shimony created, the exhibition’s title, Disruptions in the Supply Chain, anchors the show in the current material reality of a world where the local and the global are intertwined in a web of interdependence. It delineates the connection between the glitches in this system over the last two years, which shaped the exhibition and the efforts to obtain gold as an image and material in a secondary market, the long and intricate history of the trade in palm trees as a symbol of luxury and an invented landscape, as well as the migration of ideas and images across periods and cultures.
