Airport In Security is a large scale installation created in duct tape directly on the walls of the gallery. The installation explores the airport as a contemporary symbol of transience and transition where strangers are challenged to contextualize their private needs within a space that is at once public and exposing. Airport In Security investigates the tensions implicit in the competing uses and practices of airport spaces. The exhibition considers private interactions in the airport including touch between strangers during security pat downs, and the light organization of passengers through endless zip lines, as well as the litany of passengers engrossed in their smart phones, which suggests the nexus of personal exchange hosted by the airport’s cavernous waiting areas. Implicit in these encounters, the interactions between people and structure highlight the tension between intimacy and vulnerability, and between eroticism and abuse, that dictates airport culture.

Engaging the line between painting and sculpture, Bassel uses duct tape to create an exciting visual vocabulary which probes the borders between public and private spheres, implicating the viewer in a relationship to the exhibition that is both as shared and as personal as the airport spaces the installation considers.

Artist Bio: Tirtzah Bassel is an Israeli artist currently living and working in New York. She works in oil, intaglio and duct tape. Bassel studied drawing and painting at the Jerusalem Studio School in Israel and has a MFA from Boston University. Her work has been exhibited in Isreal, Europe and the United States, and has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, New York Daily Report, Speaker’s Lab, ynet and the Forward. Bassel is the recipient of a 2011-2012 LABA Fellowship at the 14th St. Y in New York and currently serves as a resident artist of the chashama studio program