RUTI SINGER | MY BLUE PENCIL | DAIRY COWS | TEARS OF MILK
MY BLUE PENCIL
I was invited to participate in the group exhibition Hunak Hun (“There is Here”) in November 2019. The exhibition, initiated by the Umm El Fahem Gallery and the Green Tapestry organization, included 15 Jewish and 15 Arab artists showing side-by-side in 6 homes in the Arab city of Umm El Fahem, Israel.
I wanted to create a video work, especially for the exhibition, reflecting my journey as an outsider. So I took hours of video footage of the city from the car window, driving up and down the steep and narrow streets.
As I struggled to get to know the city, I started making meticulous condensed drawings of the city in minute detail that was very different from anything I had done before. The drawings are in blue pencil on white paper, which serves as a device to reference collective cultural memory, for example, the blue carbon paper used to replicate data, or blueprints, or memories of foreign places frozen in pastoral delftware. On a different level, blue and white are politically charged colors, those of the Israeli flag.
In the “Foreign Tourist” video art, a car whizzes through the city. The GPS stumbles over the Arabic street names’ pronunciation, while the camera is blocked by fences and walls, keeping the viewer out. Fleeting drawings are interspersed as vistas in the gaps between houses, but they are gone almost before you can register them. In the video, too, I am a stranger in this city, trying to decipher it, trying to get to know it and its people, my neighbors.
https://www.rutisingerart.com/foreigntouristvideo
My video and drawings were scheduled to
be exhibited at the Jabarin household, but the Coronavirus took over. During the first lockdown, I began drawing from photos taken inside the family living room, which houses a crowded and fascinating collection
of objects. Later, when the exhibition finally began, we got to know each other better, spending many hours together. Since then, Amir Jabarin and I have been holding an ongoing correspondence.
I draw a postcard-sized image using my trademark blue pencil, based on one of the many photos I took at his house, and he writes to tell me his thoughts about the image or the family history behind
the items. He sends me a photo, and I draw it. Back and forth across the oceans of time.
Amir wrote:
“This drawing makes me consider the significance of the words’ moment’ and ‘now.’
We tend to think of them as units of time, but in fact, they take no time at all.
Before this ‘moment’, everything was in the past, and after it all is in the future, but the moment itself does not exist. As soon as you become aware of it, it becomes part of the past… The drawing’s alchemy is to freeze that ‘moment’, extend it for hours and hours, giving it the dimension of time that it was lacking. Suddenly a moment is hours.”
RUTI SINGER
Ruti Singer was born in Southern Africa (Swaziland) in 1961. Lives and works in Kfar Yona, Israel. Holds a BFA in Cinema and Television (1987) and an MFA in Theater and Lighting Design (1994), both from Tel Aviv University.
Recipient of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Prize. In recent years she studied painting and sculpture in private workshops and courses, including Japanese Sumi-e ink painting and classes with artists Yadid Rubin, Maya Cohen-Levy, and artist/curator Revital Ben-Asher Peretz.
Singer engages mainly in drawing and painting in ink and mixed technique on paper, in varying sizes, as well as drawing-based video art. In her work, abstract black ink landscapes seep through the fibers of delicate, fragile paper.
The stains permeate the tissue, bleeding through to the other side, taking on a life of their own, delineating dynamic and dramatic storms or alternatively subtle vibrations of nature and the minutest whispers of existence.
Juxtaposed over these monochromatic backdrops inspired by Japanese and Chinese traditions are fragments of images, creatures, or objects distilled from her collected images, whether current or born from the physical and emotional landscapes of her childhood.
Her works explore socio-political themes alongside more personal motifs. They address the interrelations between
humans and their connection with and effect upon nature while examining how collective identities and sensibilities are created and interwoven. Singer has participated in solo and group shows in Israel and overseas. Her works are included in private collections in Israel and abroad.
