Rani Sasson’s artwork moves along the axis between horror and seduction.  Sasson builds large-scale three-dimensional installations, mysterious sculptures that seem to have been created by a magic spell embodied in carbonized, cleft forms, such as scorched shells similar to fossils or fragments of stars. These are enigmatic objects hovering through space, each lacking something. They are limbs or perhaps parts of plants, unidentified live objects still in their shells, remnants bearing evidence of life in a timeless, unknown place, relics of an ancient world, which may be the buds of a new world like an archaeology of the future.

 

Using vacuum molds and casts made of various plastics and polymers, Sasson constructs unusually detached organs, providing them with a new space to which they must adapt. The objects formed through Sasson’s unique work process of deconstruction, connection and restoration are treated with restraint and handled with care, but also burst open by virtue of their uncontrollable inner nature.

 

Further to her occupation with “feminine nipples” as a source of attachment and nourishment, Sasson explores the physical boundaries of bodily organs. She engages in the female organs of reproduction and fertility and in their monstrous aspects perceived as a source of danger. Along with their violent power, the sculptures’ softness and vulnerability are also present, arising from their exposure in a new, foreign space as independent, detached objects.   

Sasson’s abstract sculptures reflect the tension between life and death, decay and vitality, and seduction and repulsion. The seductiveness is not trivial; its sensuousness characterizes the complex human condition, embodying spirituality, sensitivity, unrestrained physicality, sexuality, and femininity.

 

Sasson’s new solo exhibition invites viewers to confront the confusion between beauty and repulsion, abstraction and clarification, and association and connotation. The confusion is the expression of the artist’s missing freedom, while the exhibition is a quest for the thin borderline between emptiness and fullness. Is freedom also found on this thin line for which the artist is searching through the material? Experimentation, confusion and lack of choice, all are embodied in the process and in the material. It is through them that Sasson finds the consolation of liberation, a concentration that creates catharsis and freedom. Evident in her works is the search for something clean and bare, but not necessarily purified – perhaps even something impure.

 

Most important to Sasson is the liberty to transform colors, forms, and textures into objects. This is the freedom without which there is no room to create art.

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Photography by Laura Lachman