Orit Hofshi

"There was, I knew, blood beneath the verdure and tombs in the deep glades of oak and fir. The fields, forests and rivers had seen war and terror, elation and desperation; death and resurrection […] It is a haunted land where greatcoat buttons from six generations of fallen soldiers can be discovered lying amidst the woodland ferns."

-Orit Hofshi, in an interview with J. Roca 

Hofshi further speaks about the influence of working in the politically charged environment of Israel as difficult, but immediately and distinctly a present aspect in her work, including an obsessive if you will collection of news, images, and data absorbing the daily life of individuals and society. I am actually interested in the seemingly opposite experience of absorbing tumultuous past and present political and social contexts from a place of displacement, both geographically and in the context of mass multiplied media. The element of obsession is a touchstone, connecting my own personal rummaging and that of our dizzying social media. Actually, both of these processes involve a deep obsession with research and detail that is nauseating as we look at the same images and stories over and over and over again in attempt to make sense of some apparent wholeness or answer through chaos.

There seems an element of mirrored halo in this displacement... polarities of connection and disconnection, of intense fragility and then a numbness that grows with any multiple that is produced, fragmented, appropriated thereafter (Warhol?) . Reinterpretation is my personal motivator, and evident for other artists/friends as well. There is a constant drive to take these heavy burdens and submit through selected processes, tests, experiments, in an attempt to break down the structures that held them/hold them in place. I am very interested in these structures and contexts, as Hofshi mentions, how they affect individuals, and memory.

Sometimes I find my memory has recorded something backwards when I am confronted with hard evidence; photographs, newspapers, statistics, foreign retellings. The tension that exists in between these multiple polarities, all at once, never settling down, gives me the most strange and pleasant vertigo.