Shai Kremer
Infected Landscape
January 6 - 30, 2011
Interested in the lasting effects of the military on the natural environment of Israel and its inhabitants, artist Shai Kremer created his color series, "Infected Landscape," between 2001 and 2006 as an attempt to document the visible traces of military violence in the war-torn country.
Israeli-born Kremer describes the project as "a seven year metaphoric portrayal of the military disfiguration of the Israeli landscape," aiming to "reveal how every piece of land has become infected with loaded sediments of the ongoing conflict."
In Kremer's photographs, the wounded, infected landscape becomes a stand-in for the war-torn lives of people on both sides. Kremer takes neither a pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian stand. Rather, he aims to make the point that people are part of the earth, and any wound on the environment is also a wound on the human condition.
Born in Israel in 1974, Shai Kremer currently divides his time between Israel, France, and the U.S. He earned a BA in photography from the Camera Obscura School of Arts, Tel Aviv, and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Julie Saul Gallery, New York (2009), the Houston Center for Photography (2009), and the Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco (2008), as well as in numerous group exhibitions in the U.S., Europe, China, Japan, and Israel. Recent awards include First Place in Landscape Photography at Edut Mekomit (Local Testimony) (2007) and the PhotoFolio Review Prize at Recontres Photographiques D'Arles (2007). Kremer's photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum, Harvard University, and Brandeis University, among others. His images have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Afterimage, and NO Magazine. Infected Landscape was published as a monograph by Dewi Lewis Publishing, UK, in 2008.
Infected Landscape appears at Blue Sky courtesy the artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York.