Miri Segal — À propos — Slash Paris

Like many modern-day artists, Miri Segal’s academic background was initially unconnected with art, her PhD having focused on mathematics. Traces of this can be found in her present work. The nature of illusion, at once optical and psychological, is essentially the constant driving force behind the deconstruction and reconstruction of subtle and clever machinery, leading to a questioning of “the viewer” — so called by Marcel Duchamp — on the place of the subject in relation to the work and the setting. Several exhibitions have allowed us to understand and fully experience Miri Segal’s work. Each one increased the number of situations in which the vision found itself caught up in a whirlwind of significations and interdependencies, giving prominence to the alienation of each of us from the world of images: a way of reminding us, as Paul Ardenne has intelligently underlined regarding the artist, that “we have a body” and that the practice of art is also there to help us to understand this. But if the art of Miri Segal, over the course of numerous exhibitions in Israel, in the USA, or previously with Kamel Mennour in 2006, constantly emphasises that we have eyes, and if the visible and appearances are undoubtedly her recurrent themes, I would also like to point out that sound and voice are unfailingly the constituent elements of her various devices. While this notion has become one of the commonest features of the art of our time, it is undoubtedly important to clarify the extent to which it allows us to describe the work of Miri Segal. With it, the work confronts the sensorial and mental chaos of our contemporary world. With it, each proposal is an interrogation of our relationship with space and time, with fixedness as with movement. Despite her training as a mathematician, Miri Segal is nonetheless a sensitive analyst of Erwin Panofsky’s “perspective as symbolic form”.

The recent works that she is now exhibiting have elements of constructions that are simultaneously clever and distinct. Miri Segal is reluctant to do anything makeshift from a pratical and symbolic aspect. Bound by her education, she would rather seek precision, a point of exactitude from which a whirlwind of emotions and meanings can tempt us. The body, our body, is thus the receptacle of infinite experiences, a play on the meaning and meanings open to multiple interpretations.

Mai 2009, excerpt of the press realease of the Mortals & Automatons exhibition, Kamel Mennour Gallery.