Maps

Maps

Noam Rabinovich

Noam Rabinovich’s Maps , as the title indicates, map the intimate relationship of the artist with his natural surroundings. Rabinovich is a unique artist: he is a sower, a tiller of the soil, and a researcher, who maintains an ongoing, day-to-day relationship with the plants he cultivates and cares for. Unlike maps that are intended to mark directions, goals, a single road to follow, Rabinovich’s Maps encourage strolling and prompt a private, sensual relationship with the place.

Like other projects in the exhibition, which spur us to rethink issues of ownership and belonging, Rabinovich also works anonymous public land, but he breathes new life into it and invests it with new meaning. The topographical lines of the wadi (dry river bed) next to his home, Kibbutz Beit Hashitah, interweave the drawing and mark the walking route itself.

Rabinovich’s work converses with a long history of botanical drawings yet does not portray the plant as an object. Rather, his art is a living testimony of working the land. Rabinovich works the paper the way he works the land. He draws and erases, erases and draws, turns it over and over – until the drawing contains the many, varied archeological layers that brought it into being.
 

Noam Rabinovich

Map 3

2010

Drawing in black ink, brown ink, and colored pencils on paper

Courtesy of the artist

Map 7

2010

Drawing in graphite and brown ink on paper

Courtesy of the artist