Treasures of the Bible Lands — gabrielavainsencher

Treasures of the Bible Lands
Limited edition photographs
2018- ongoing

On a 2018 trip to Israel, in a used book store, I found Treasures of the Bible Lands, a catalogue for a 1987 exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The exhibition showed artifacts found in and around what we now call Israel and its neighboring countries. The catalogue featured striking photographic documentation of the artifacts of the myriad civilizations that lived in the Middle East in ancient times. Since acquiring the catalogue, I have been physically and conceptually mining it to produce a new body of work: photographs of the book’s pages, cut up and layered. By making holes in the photos, I physically edited out the objects, leaving only negative spaces and the shadows that they had cast on their lurid backgrounds. These ravaged pages became fuel for images that call to mind the holes in the ground after an archeological expedition has departed; the negative space left behind by something that has been taken away.