If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.
Agnes Varda
Varda’s statement demonstrates the illusory, even hallucinatory distinctions between our inner and outer worlds. Her poignant metaphor certainly speaks to the importance of memory and story-telling in human existence. It is a more common convention to suggest that all paintings are a version of self-portraiture but this is an overly reductive notion, one often trotted out as a convenient justification for a conspicuous lack of content, let alone subject.
When I spend time with Liat Yossifor’s paintings I am struck by how apt Varda’s ‘blue-sky’ analogy feels, but perhaps more correctly, its inversion – that were we to dig further into the ravines and gullies of Yossifor’s topographical landscapes that we’d find her.
Of course, what we find is so much more because what Yossifor achieves manages to be both deeply personal but is also a performance, largely without ego. Hers are not showy gestures – legible autographs – rather they exist as evidence of a secret excavations made largely in the name of others.
Opening Hours
- Tuesday - Friday, 11am - 5pm
- Saturday, 11am -3pm
Address
- 10 Putiki Street
- Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, 1021
If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.
Agnes Varda
Varda’s statement demonstrates the illusory, even hallucinatory distinctions between our inner and outer worlds. Her poignant metaphor certainly speaks to the importance of memory and story-telling in human existence. It is a more common convention to suggest that all paintings are a version of self-portraiture but this is an overly reductive notion, one often trotted out as a convenient justification for a conspicuous lack of content, let alone subject.
When I spend time with Liat Yossifor’s paintings I am struck by how apt Varda’s ‘blue-sky’ analogy feels, but perhaps more correctly, its inversion – that were we to dig further into the ravines and gullies of Yossifor’s topographical landscapes that we’d find her.
Of course, what we find is so much more because what Yossifor achieves manages to be both deeply personal but is also a performance, largely without ego. Hers are not showy gestures – legible autographs – rather they exist as evidence of a secret excavations made largely in the name of others.
