The Art Between

“Myths frame the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. When we can travel freely between the mythic and the real, we gain the capacity to understand who we are.”

 Yehuda Levy-Aldema

 

Each of Levy-Aldema’s works is a visual exploration of mystery that pairs a drawing painting or sculpture with a photograph. Many of the art works use stories from the Abrahamic traditions to probe the real human experiences embedded in the Biblical texts. The photographs capture the mythic in the everyday—a shadow, an evocative texture, an enigmatic object. He places the two elements on a strongly vertical ground in which one hovers tantalizingly above the other in a metaphorical dialogue between an imagined heaven and an experienced earth, each mirroring parallel aspects of reality and myth in each other. Levy-Aldema makes frames for the works out of wood and found objects that draw attention to its function as a container, and the resultant juxtapositions—a subjective human reality drawn from a Biblical story and a mythic projection that emerges from quotidian reality—are thus framed in a metaphor of the self.

 

In the photographic elements, he seeks out fleeting shadows and illusions in real places that hint at the mysteries he senses all around him. “The photograph is reality, here and now. I’m not using Photoshop or any other technique; you see exactly what I saw through the lens. To me the mythic image is reality. It is the uncertainty, the duality between what is real and the myth that is contained within that reality.” He places the two elements one above the other, because “the primary relation is between heaven and earth, between the concrete and the abstract. We experience this same thing every day, even with those we love, connecting and disconnecting from each other. So the drawing and the photograph are the earth and the sky and the space between. The Biblical text helps us to understand this is life.”

 

Connection and disconnection, heaven and earth, myth and reality. For Yehuda Levy-Aldema, these define the essence of our existence. His works are deeply philosophical, yet they provide perspective on the issues, large and small, that we confront every day. “We have a definite idea that we know, but the fact is we don’t know. That’s hard to deal with. But you have much more freedom when you can feel the endlessness contained by the Biblical texts that we have. The Biblical stories held myths that frame the by stories that we tell ourselves about our lives. When we can travel freely between the Biblical texts and the realty here and now, we gain the capacity to understand who we are.”