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“I am a new media installation artist, using dimensionality to explore the human experience through personal narratives. Personal includes individual community perspectives and does not shy from the multi-cultured sources from which an identity is formed. Mediums include photography and video performance, interactive installation, assemblage and found objects. The works range from large scale and outdoors, to interior textile-like peices, all the way to shelf-size sculptures that I assemble as mini installations. A series of digitally processed photographs was born out of the miniature works. I use the lens to continue my investigation into dimensionality, revisioning the miniatures as true-to-life installations, in imaginary environments.
I am influenced by American Art aesthetics, and by movements such as echo-feminism, mysticism, and symbolism. I look for materials that hold no unique value but are basic materials in our environments. I study their characteristics, to tweak out their meaning. The universally symbolic imagery I use with these materials continues my attempt at discovering personal meaning through connecting to humanity’s experience at large. I am curious about the ephemeral, and its influence on our experience, based here and now but built in a continuum from the past to future”.
Yehudis Barmatz-Harris (b. Boston 1985) lives in Southeast Israel and works in new-media, assemblage, and installation. She holds a BFA from the Pratt Institute, New York, and a MART from Leslie College, Israel. Yehudis’ influences are multifaceted. As a Hasidic Jew, she is inspired by mysticism in artists such as Hilma of Klimt, while her methods are born out of American ecofeminist, process art movements. Her work focuses on the nexus of individual and community and embraces an identity as essential to artistic expression. Her site-specific projects include her public work “Well of Living Waters,” built with the help of local children in a low-income neighbourhood; “Triple Thread,” a memorial in conversation with older community members: and “Person Place and Thing,” a pop-up exhibition in the abandoned historical building of the seminal Eitz Haim Yeshiva. Yehudis has exhibited in Israel, the United States and in Europe.
Yehudis Barmatz-Harris has also worked as an assistant to the curator David Gibson in New York City, interviewing and writing curatorial notes for his work in progress. She has conducted interviews of artists in Israel, working as reporter for Individual Collective/Sarah Lehat and contributing articles for Jewish Art Now.
In addition to her Fine Arts practice, Yehudis Barmatz-Harris is an art therapist, and has taught arts to a variety of populations, including tutoring an autistic adult who now is an exhibiting artist, giving workshops in an eating disorder rehab, and painting and drawing classes to elementary and high school students within the ultra orthodox community.
View artists posts here.
yehudisb.h@gmail.com