Uprooted in Dimona, 2011
mixed media on plywood, 40x40

In Yair Garbuz’s paintings, the meaning of the familiar, visible, and explicit is altered through shifts, highlights, and deliberate errors that draw attention to the hidden and implicit, taking us behind-the-scenes of language and reality. Thus, for example, the nuclear facility in the southern Israeli town cannot be discussed, but what about the one Uprooted in Dimona? (nuclear and uprooted person, are spelled almost the same in Hebrew, and sound exactly the same) May he be discussed? In any event, they dwell in horrifying proximity—the reactor and the uprooted—out there, in the heart of the desert. The one has been hidden from view and from the social-economic-cultural discourse for nearly sixty years; the other is censored ad nauseam. Both are known but not seen, and the joke has always been on us.

Jewish Inventors and Explorers, 2011
mixed media on plywood, 40x40

As is the case with many of Garbuz’s works, the title of his other work in the show, Jewish Inventors and Explorers, sends out a split poisoned arrow: it is aimed primarily at the foolish pride taken in identifying the Jewish gene in science, technology, and any and every endeavor, but also takes a jab at the paranoid identification of the Jews as the cause of every calamity and misfortune in the world. Moreover, in a reversal of sorts and a rounding out of a circle, his work connects these two strains: the Jews indeed hold a place of honor among the great inventors and explorers, but their studies and discoveries have often led, directly and indirectly, to catastrophic outcomes.