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About Artist's Work - Maura Ruskin
Macklef’s Tel Aviv series addresses with a newness and freshness this place, which serves as important subject to which she always returns - both physically and symbolically – as well as the place she feels most at home. This series includes interior shots, as well as frames looking outward towards the landscape, the neighborhood of Florentine. Her photograph Tel Aviv Balcony depicts a peeling and dilapidated setting, as well as includes vacant and uninviting chairs, which the artist waits to be filled. Like the Japanese photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki, Macklef uses the urban environment as a backdrop for her work.
Her Tel Aviv series also includes several self portraits depicting the artist dressed in a Japanese kimono, which recalls the artist’s recurring childhood fancy of all things Asian. Macklef uses the device of costumes in order to construct her scenes and to express her inner world, passions, and fears. Her work draws from the Japanese qualities of color, composition, and means of expression, and often makes reference to the associated cultural and aesthetic conflicts and paradoxes, such as the strict adherence to tradition that clashes with contemporary modern life.
Macklef’s images often harbor phallic elements as well as convey feelings of loneliness, which comment on the artist’s personal struggle, reflect her passions and fears, and deal with her efforts to reconcile issues of life and death. Her photographs, set up with artificial light, contain strong contrasts creating a sense of drama.
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