LEZLI RUBIN-KUNDA, performance documents presented at Fleishman Gallery

> LESLI RUBIN-KUNDA: Outside In

Opening Reception: Friday October 17th 7-9pm

Lezli Rubin-Kunda is a multidisciplinary artist who uses live action, as well as installation, drawing, photography and video to explore her relationship with her surroundings.

The three video pieces presented here, all deal with a place. Through simple spontaneous actions and activities, using the materials of the immediate surroundings in interaction with the artist’s body, they connect to different sites, each with its physical, as well as symbolic, cultural, or metaphysical dimensions. Two of the works are created from documentation from performance festivals. In Down to Earth, the artist digs up earth, carries it through the streets and then descends into an old wine cellar where she acts and plays with the earth and other local produce and debris.

The third and longest work, Housekeeping, is an extended meditation on the reality and concept of home. It is comprised of 11 short video ‘poems’, each one related to different aspects, both material and philosophical, of the artist ‘s relation to her home in all its complexity. Home is the place of living, working , daydreaming, a rich and fertile ground for creating.

It is the hearth, and I am like the goddesss Hestia, guarding the domestic realm; it is the meeting place between sacred and profane space; it is an arena of daily life, from the trivial and banal to the most transcendent: sometimes a trap, sometimes a shelter. Seeing the house as a performance arena blurs the boundaries of art and life, of domestic and artistic pursuits; when I set up my camera every action becomes fraught with layers of significance.

In these works, any assumptions of home as refuge, as order against the chaos, as domestic vs wordly - are reexamined. Rootedness and permanence are brought to question: human constructs cannot keep out the inevitability of flux and dissolution. The built world and the natural world continually fuse, shifting positions.

The artist holds a BA from the University of Toronto in Interdisciplinary Studies, and an MFA from the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She currently lives in Israel, teaching in the Architecture and City Planning area at the Technion, Haifa, Israel. www.lezlirubinkunda.com