Michal Makaresco
https://www.instagram.com/vanesa_dvd/
Michal Makaresco, originally from Bat Hen, Hefer Valley, lives and works in Tel-Aviv.
The artist earned her BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem (2010), as well as additional photography studies at the Camera Obscura School for the Arts (2006) and Hamidrasha College (2017).
Makaresco participated in solo, group and duo shows in established galleries such as Sommer gallery and Hayarkon 19 Gallery as well as in alternative spaces like Zimmer and Ha’hanut 31. Her artistic practice includes painting, drawing, video, assemblage/collage, installation, digitally manipulated photography and mixed media sculpture. She has also experimented in poetry, music, curating, fanzine making and acting in alternative theater productions.
Through her work, Makaresco practices trasgressive raw Feminism with Individualism. She uses explicit sexual humor and “Bad” aesthetics as a critical tool to deal with intersectionality and digital age contemporary art “Progress traps”.
Her latest solo exhibition, "Would you walk me Home?", which was curated by Boaz Arad at Hayarkon 19 Gallery in January 2017, combined small scale, hand-sized, mixed media sculptures in an installation combined with snap-shot digital photography. The two medias, Sculpture and Photography, are similar in their sensuality qualities. Those artworks created with two mediums used as two channels connect to feminist art with both historic and contemporary manifestations. Makaresco’s photographs and sculptures both capture coarsely modeled/directly shot fragmented body parts featuring cosmetic “Beauty” details, like sparkly nail polish and jewelry, while the bulk of the objects presented look fragile, temporary, and on the verge of decay. Makaresco’s “slap on” additive sculpture technique supposedly trying to merge the classic clay with found/ dollar store bought objects deliberately creates a mutation of hard core visuals in a crumbling package. This “anti-fetish” aesthetics acts as a direct reaction to handcraft art and decorative art (associated with women) in order to penetrate the skin of a facade of beauty, to challenge the notion of what is considered “grotesque”. The snap-shot photography sourced in Makaresco’s Instagram account vanesa_dvd, portrays a black mirror for popular-mainstream 4th wave - "selfie” Femini$m as celebrated by Millennials in social media and fully devoured by Capitalism as a marketing tool.
While an effort to “cash in” on American/global Feminism trend by other Israeli young female photographers and designers sins in duplicating orientalism and self colonization, Makaresco presents a peripheral, non touristic, unfiltered hyper pseudo reality that exaggerates the preposterous of lifestyle photos by contradicting them and using social media as a reflective medium rather than a transparent platform. The the absence of refinement in Makaresco’s work is not a cool sloppy style but a long thought and calculated artist statement, an inseparable part of the work.; a clarification prism for whomever is willing to see her truth.
Michal Makaresco, Walk Me Home Installation view, Hamidrasha Gallery Photography: Elinor Salomon