Days

2024, Orit Vashdi Gallery, Tel Aviv

Like the cherry blossom in Japanese culture, Doron Oved captures points along the timeline that reveal the height of beauty and the melancholy intangibility of life. Life in general, and life here and now.

Urban photos that document what at first look like everyday scenes, at a second glance turn out to be the high points in
the urban life cycle.

Oved looks at what is happening in front of her without interfering, waiting patiently and attentively for rare moments: the moment when the lavish chair and the plastic tool box will come together; the spiraling fragments of an unwinding gutter pipe on a narrow sidewalk;

electrical wires loosely gathered high above. These occurrences encapsulate the
singular life mission of the photographed objects – which are in fact subjects with their own will and resolve: the payphone handset will never reach further, the rock in the snow has never said nothing more precise, the cloud that
crosses the sky will vanish in an instant.

The thought put into each photograph – its size, framing, placement – is like an attempt to bring the sublime and ephemeral moments back to life, to generously conjure the experience of the one-off encounter with them for the viewer. As if this is not just the record of something that has already passed, but the very thing itself.

And what is the thing itself?

What is it about these works that
touches us so?

Perhaps it is the comfort of the
familiar.

The entire exhibition can be read as a lexicon of the environment that has always been around us – but it is not often that we pause and really look at it. While at the heart of the works there is indeed a great deal of the broken, the sullied, the wounded, the neglected, the lonely – the beauty emerges from the wound; the city is a hidden portal to another place, and the loneliness is aimed at the heart. As though the simple, the domestic, and the familiar come to the surface from the depths of pain and hardship.

“And all things are simple/and alive/and you may touch them” (Leah Goldberg).

Curator Orit Vashdi, 2024