Jack Jano – The Geography Of Inheritance
Past Exhibition
1.2.2024 - 1.3.2024
The Geography of Inheritance / Gavriel Engel 2024
Jack jano lives and creates with his family on the mountain. As an artist and a builder in the land of Israel, he deals with the development and expansion of his borders of creation and estate daily, delving into both geographically in his art.
In the current exhibition at the Engel Gallery, we exhibit a subject that occupies Jack Jano in his art: The Maps of the Land of Israel. The Maps are a major part of his deep research of the settler artist on the mountain regarding his position as an Israeli and Jewish artist in Israel.
Jano uses the Image of the map and its layout as a frame for the development of many events in his creation, and out of reference to his deep entire creation.
In the exhibition maps are shown in different sizes and made of different materials: rusted iron, wood, glass and wire. Jano fills the map’s space with letters and words, houses and buildings, Hebrew and Jewish symbols, attaching and detaching tools and kitchenware, weapons and cut books, and even raises his maps on wheels and ships. All those fill the map’s space, and in fact the areas of the full land of Israel, with images that occupy him both in his private life and in his national perception shown in his art.
Jano deals with the question of his artistic identity though his various artworks and maps: who am I, what am I and what is my place here in my country. He loves the complete land of Israel and is very connected to it, unapologetically so, to the contrary – he lives and breaths the tension that forms between his contemporary art and the art created in Israel and in its cultural foundations, which don’t see Israeli nationalism in a good light. In his honesty and his devotion to the study of his inner truth Jano raises difficult questions of Am Israel again and again, in Israel and abroad, busy and occupied by them every hour.
During these chaotic days of the many atrocities that happened in the south of Israel on the 7th of October, in our struggle for survival against enemies foreign, domestic and along our borders, and while his immediate family, Jano’s brothers and sisters, were forced to evacuate their homes due to the constant violence from the north – this exhibition receives validity in the unending struggle for our beloved country’s geography, and our place here as part of the physical and spiritual space of the middle east.
