| Artemis Alcalay has an extraordinary ability to be contemporary and simultaneously human, thus timeless, at anything she tackles. She achieves this by managing to combine seemingly incompatible elements in the same space, a space defined not geometrically but ideologically, spatially, and chronically.
In other words she combines notions, materials, technologies and "memory," a word with an entirely different meaning for her due to her heritage. She combines these elements in a particularly sensitive and resourceful way. Perhaps it is not accidental that she pays such attention to the combination of simple materials and especially to weaving.
On the other hand, weaving is a web of intersecting cotton or wool fibers creating a surface which protects human existence from the elements but simultaneously conceals parts of the human body connected to the feeling we call "shame."
The clothes, those remaining empty for an unnatural reason, or those constituting the sole protection in an irrational environment, return as an undercurrent of memory in Artemis Alcalay's work.
It is precisely with this type of weave that Artemis Alcalay intertwines simple materials, memories, ideas and, lately, modern technology. She deals with it as well as a type of weave which intertwines all ideas and images above transporting the same experience to a digital space.
Either way this space, the World Wide Web, constitutes a kind of weaving. Links on the internet, much as pixels on electronic images, represent a different kind of intangible weave which combines a complex process that surrounds us, noiselessly. Anyhow the evolution of computer owes much to Jacard and the mechanism he developed, with punch cards, for automatic weaving.
 Dr. Manthos Santorinaios
Assistant Professor
Athens School of Fine Art
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It is always intriguing challenging one’s own means of expression; and in doing so, bring forth analogies among until recently unlikely media: weaving and digital analysis. It is obvious that through her concentration on weaving, Artemis Alcalay has tried, among others, to make a statement about artifacts that honor the handmade tradition, an almost bodily and tactile experience of the work in an era of virtual reality.
The conversion of that work into its digital counterpart presents us, I believe, with an interesting conceptual case that merits attention. In her digital images we see representations of weaving patterns, an electronic make-believe of the hand-making experience. The analogue drawn here is powerful and suggestive. Digital image is a kind of "pixel weave", an interweaving of electronic data. One could extend this thought and imagine the World Wide Web as a kind of intangible fabric of information. "Digital weaving" is here a metaphor of the conversion of so many of our experiences into their electronic counterparts. The conceptual character of Artemis’s digital work lies exactly in the fact that it unravels into further layers of meaning. The metaphoric play from the bodily to the electronic reveals an even more profound understanding of the "weave" itself: a mode of contemporary multi-faceted existence. Indeed an existence torn between the real and the virtual experience and equally fascinated by the possible analogies between the two.
Dr. Ourania Kouvou
Art Education
University of Athens |
