Instruction:
Matti Harel and Tal Yerushalmi

Noa Bernat’s graduate exhibition was born out of thoughts of skin, surfaces, and their injury. The fabric in her works resembles a skin stretched on a frame; the painting is a body engraved with the ravages of time. The stretched Lycra fabrics become semi-transparent due to the stretching, sometimes to the point of exposing the structure of the wooden frame. Bernat travels the world with Google Maps, flies over Israel and Lebanon, and arrives in Madagascar. She photographs areas of the ocean and edits them so the information the eye receives consists completely of changing densities of black dots (bitmaps); these she prints into a manual screen print. Bernat sees the waves as the stretch marks of the world. At the heart of her work is the movement along the spectrum between reality and fiction. Tying the stones into the cloth creates physical stretch marks that stand opposite the illusion of volume created by the printing technique: a printed crease meets a three-dimensional crease. This creates a dialogue between image and reality.

Photo: Achikam Ben-Yosef