Sharon Pazner / Sealed
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“Sealed” is a sculptural installation comprised of fabrics that were soaked in wet cement and dried. Sharon Pazner created the installation in memory of a close friend who passed away this year, as it deals with the continuing mourning process of this person, who had a profound impact on her life.

A series of “envelopes”, made out of towels and blanket cloths which were dipped in cement and then folded and dried, are hung across the gallery walls. Another pile of envelopes is placed on the floor. Three additional works were created in a similar technique, while the cemented fabrics in them echo the shapes of real-life objects even more accurately. Here objects were covered in wet fabrics which were then removed from them, left to dry in their shape. They include a covering of a chair and two mirrors. These are familiar day-to-day objects, yet the specific materiality of the cemented fabrics, the ghostly presence of the newly created objects and the abundance of envelopes compared with the loneliness of the chair and mirrors all imply that this is not a real space, yet a mental or imagined one.

The towels and blankets used by Pazner were once soft and delicate, yet now their firm texture reveals little of their previous nature, preventing viewers from penetrating this mask. Pazner compares this technique to an accelerated fossilization process, creating objects that freeze in time and remain immortal. They inhabit an encounter between the intimate matter used for covering the body and the most common material applied in construction. Pazner, a trained architect who tends to incorporate her knowledge of such materials in her work, is looking to emphasize the manner in which cement is being used locally – usually in its coarse and grainy version, as visible on the flakey walls of buildings across Tel Aviv.

Grief is being illustrated through the different objects in the exhibition, in their unique creation process, as well as the selected materials and the metamorphosis they undergo. All of these express, according to Pazner, “a strange sense of presence, despite her disappearance”.

Sharon Pazner was born in 1970 in Israel. She received her degree in architecture from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and also studied at the “Ecole d’Architecture Paris La Villette” in Paris. Pazner had previously presented her works in galleries such as Ermanno Tedeschi in Rome, Rakt-Art in Budapest and Gross in Tel Aviv, and in group exhibitions in Kunstraum Richard Sorge in Berlin, Vittoriano Museum in Rome, Hangar Bicocca in Milan and in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.