Noam Simner
From Dream to Reality
My grandmother sitting on a low white plastic chair on a bright green lawn in front of a house with popcorn concrete decorations. The memory of my childhood landscape in the moshav I grew up on is laced with architecture and elements typical of the local periphery: plastic “Keter” chairs, concrete ornaments, grass lawns, tile roofs. These are objects and symbols, generic, nondescript elements that make the houses look like one another.
The yearning to belong and the bourgeois dream replace diverse culture. They help global culture take over. The current economic outlook drives us to consume objects that define our identity, what we wish to be, where we want to belong. From the ads we learn about our needs and how these products meet them and our desire to define ourselves through them. Local construction and consumption attempt to delineate our identity by producing generic objects adapted to us, yet devoid of any unique feature, in effect erasing our identity.
In the piece, I created constructs and configurations of these objects and symbols, in the desire to breath a new life into them, turning them into towers and pillars. Functional objects transform into decorative sculptures, exposing consumer culture and emptying it of a distinct identity.