Larger-than-life at Bezalel art school

Elinor Sahim sat cross-legged in the igloo she’d made of masking tape and pillow stuffing, inviting visitors to park themselves on the igloo’s soft white floor and listen to the mellow jazz playing in the background.

“This is my safe place,” she told her crowd, grabbing one of half-dozen round “pillow mirrors” onto her lap — giant marshmallow-esque cushions with mirrored surfaces that reflected the igloo’s ceiling. A TV screen on the roof of the igloo played a 30-minute photomontage of 800 friends and family members’ faces, each headshot featuring someone wearing Sahim’s signature blue glasses. A time-consuming project, and one which took Sahim more than two years to complete.

Working through ideas, concepts and process is the idea behind this end-of-year show, comprising the work of the more than 100 students graduating from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design this year. The exhibit includes works from the school’s various departments, including visual communication, ceramics and glass, jewelry and fashion, industrial design, screen arts, photography and fine art.

It’s difficult not to get lost in the meandering show, which ambles through each department. One staircase in the Fine Arts department leads to a room that is nearly empty. In the center stands a piece by Liran Malausi, a long planter full of leafy greens and plants about a foot wide and 10 feet long. It appears as if it was taken straight from the garden.

“Don’t walk up that staircase,” warned Shir Mishal, another one of the artists, pointing to another set of steps, not unlike the ones leading to Malausi’s piece, “It’s part of my art.”

Mishal’s piece, entitled “Not Gods But Men,” is a recreation of a synagogue that is spread out over multiple rooms and that staircase. It is a mixed media piece involving structures, photographs and a video. She set up a large bed frame in one room and piled hundreds of 10-shekel pieces underneath each leg. The items are daily things, she said, “things we never bother to pick up.”

Outside the Fine Arts Department, the set-up is quieter and the art easier to distinguish from its surroundings. Over in the Photography department, the walls were neatly lined with photo after photo taken by the exhibiting students. At the back of the exhibition, however, the photography, once again, blended in with its setting. One room, home to a large, hanging white orb and various lighting instruments, looked like a storage unit. But the back wall of the room was hung with “Optic Nerve” by Tamar Dovrat. The piece looks like the X-ray of a giant’s eye and could have come straight out of an anatomy textbook. It shows the pathway of the optic nerve in the eye, the artist said, where light is translated to the brain the moment before it “is destroyed by reason” and corrupted by logic.

The public is welcome to explore all the art on display in the various departments of the Bezalel Academy end-of-year show, July 21 through August 2 at the Hebrew University campus at Mount Scopus. Visiting hours are Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m., and Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.