Book Launch: “Inspection Chambers”, Guest Speakers:
Dr. Irena Gordon, Chief Curator of the Petah Tikva Museum of Art.
Prof. Tamar Elor, Professor of Anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Dalit Matatyahu, Senior Curator Israeli Art, Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Orit Hofshi, Artist

Landscape is commonly defined as a section of natural scenery that can be seen from a single viewpoint - a totality perceived and interpreted by the human subject.
The word place carries a broad range of meanings, including: a portion of space available or designated for someone; a vacancy or unoccupied position; a position in a sequence or hierarchy; a person׳s rank or status; a geographical location, venue, or setting.

Orit Hofshi׳s (b. 1959, Kibbutz Matsuva) work articulates the intersecting interpretations of landscape, space, and place, as she repeatedly returns to the woodblocks underlying her images, exploring their multiplicity, their incarnations, their modes of existence, as well as their shadows, their ghosts. Her materials, formal, conceptual and mental actions themselves constitute a landscape, a space, and a place, carrying history and time, The affinity between culture and nature: earth and water, humans and animals, seem to emerge reciprocally, mourning and sustaining each other. It is an entity that constantly probes itself, its survival, its loss, as a visual archive that bears traces of the time of its formation.
The images dwell in their own ruins, perhaps in their becoming, in an intermediate realm between a concrete place and nowhere; they unfold as cross-sections, rhythms, resonances, while the cracked, tumultuous earth occupies most of the works׳ visual field. In a continuous seismic movement, in the absence of tranquil or controlled relationship between the figures in the works and the place they inhabit, and between the viewer and the landscape unfolded, the horizon is agitated and the surface disintegrates.
We are confronted with a hybrid language consisting of woodcut prints on handmade paper, as well as the woodblocks from which they were printed, unprinted carved woodblocks, ink and pencil drawings and paintings, rubbings, monotype prints, and spatial installations. In the exhibition Inspection Chambers, all of these converge into an overarching structure, a visual panorama that can be entered, studied, lived in, while evoking memories.
Grounded in woodcutting, Hofshi׳s monumental work undermines the distinction between printing block, image and object, between the original and reproduction, and it is shaped through a virtuoso, painterly and sculptural mastery of the various means of expression. Her images, their traces and echoes, accumulate into an archive from which she continually draws in creating new compositions and meanings.
Much like the infrastructure remnants and monuments, the human and animal figures are both witnesses to the occurrences and inseparable from them; they turn away from the events, and yet remain stubbornly rooted in them, in gestures of lament and grief.

The book, published concurrently with Inspection Chambers, presents a recent body of work alongside earlier pieces, pulling the viewer into the core of the dialogue between print and installation, the printed image and spatial experience. Print, as a reproductive, mobile, archival medium suggesting historical time, encounters installation as a one-off, site- and time-specific medium, a medium of the present.
The turbulent, all-encompassing views in her work are material and mental ruins experienced physically, beckoning the viewer to concentrate on the surface while delving into the depths of Hofshi’s modus operandi.