After 20 years in Israel Abby Junge returns to Mexico, her homeland, with a series of physical and conceptual explorations.

 

For the first time we will be able to see her graphic images printed in clay, where she proposes a new interaction. In linoleum, Junge has found the technique of a medium that allows her to explore and communicate her identity. The "unforgivable" linoleum, like her perfectionist personality, has been an ally that has taught to her accept her mistakes.

 

Her work is a continuous reaffirmation of her identity. Although experiences leave a stamp on who lives them, Abby reprints them on other surfaces. Paper, cloth and now clay. Her voluntary exile - her departure from Mexico to Israel - provokes the exaltation of her identity by generating elements of a strong Mexicanness . Her references suggest a mental map of the spaces she visited as well as a menu of flavors and smells that spread throughout the Mexican territory. The invitation to approach ceramics is not arbitrary, it starts from identifying in Abby a sensitivity and a interest in experimenting and diversifying her practices. This flexibility and freedom is a mirror of the migratory decisions of the artist.

 

Yearning; to recognize oneself as a stranger. To be marked, stamped,  and for others; be seal. To carve to convey an identity on a surface.

 

Abby graduated as a designer in 2008 and later migrated to art using linoleum as her principal medium. She has exhibited at the Azrieli Gallery and at Beth Hansen, both in Israel. She has been interviewed for Carrie and has received several awards as a graphic designer. Abby is the mother of three women. Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel.

THE AZRIELI GALLERY, the new gallery for visual arts and design at the Hadassah Academic College Jerusalem (HAC), under the direction of Judith Guetta, Head of HAC’s Department of Photographic Communications, and with Curator Tal Schwartz, opened its second exhibition: "Lines of Action" - animation and illustration by leading creative artists from Israel and around the world, as part of the Jerusalem OUTLINE FESTIVAL of Illustration and Poetics.

"Lines of Action" explores ties and encounters between photography, animation, and illustration through works by first-rate local and international contemporary artists. At the core of the exhibition are processes of creating alternative, fictional narratives in place of historical or biographical realities, into which elements of reality are intertwined within the new work. The resulting new, and perhaps simulated, worldview generates questions about the delicate seamline between what was and what could have been.

The works on view use materials taken from photographs and film, but the work processes create metamorphoses and displacements, deconstruction or dismemberment, taking these materials and recombining them. In some of the works, photographs serve as the inspiration or starting point for an entirely new piece; others are the raw material undergoing fragmentation or stratification. Rotoscope animation, (frame after frame of manual or digital illustration over photographs), and stop-motion technique, are both based on photography. Some of the filmmakers developed new and unique techniques to integrate photography together with animation. The exhibition reveals work processes alongside the finished works, showing a "behind the scenes" look at the field, and an inside view of the mechanisms that drive the both animation and illustration.

Azrieli Gallery, a gift of the Azrieli Foundation (Canada) to HAC, intends to showcase the vibrant spirit of the conceptual and applied creative work being undertaken in HAC's Departments of Photographic Communications and the DAN Department of Creative Human Design. Situated on the City's interface between East and West, straddling secular and ultra-Orthodox communities, the Gallery strives to reach a variety of local and international audiences. The Azrieli Gallery is well on its way to becoming a significant and influential new venue in the fields of photography and design.

Since 2008, I discovered this wonderful niche, of social and political posters.  I discovered it purely by mistake, but has been a big part as my formation as an artist. long before i called myself an artist per se.

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For years as an active social poster designer and artist, i have been fortunate enough, to be on both sides of this world, as an award winning designer, as well as an organiser.

Absolutely, look at the pictures here to see me name (face) dropping.