Playing?!

When looking from a distance at children playing, it seems innocent, fun, and free of any worries. However, if you approach, you can see that play is the way children encounter life. It contains within it joy, laughter, curiosity, imagination, and excitement, but also conflicts, risks, jealousy, and competition. Success also as well as failure. In play, children enact life itself.

I choose to view life as a game, and in my work I infuse the theme of playfulness. I've created characters, each bringing a different game, encountering a different aspect of reality. So, for example, the character holding the balls tries to catch them all, and some slip away from her. Another character- a man sewing the quilt of his life- tightly holds the threads; The small character trying to roll the big golden cube; The character struggling to climb from depths leaves a part of herself inside the cube, but she is filled with light. And the innocence of the child holding the bird in his hand, asking it to fly above and reveal the world for him…

Kaplan created a team of "players", which she places and activates on a "playground", using a variety of images and techniques. The players and the material out of which they are made express situations that are an integral part of our lives. Kaplan's compositions constitute her response to the world we live in, one saturated with forms and images. They raise questions and thoughts regarding subjects such as identity, concealment, exposure and discovery, misgivings and nostalgia…

Esty Drori,

Curator of the exhibitions: "Five Stones" and "Playing!"

Credit:

Curator: Esti Drori

Graphic Design: Anat Noga

Photography: Dima Valershtein

All profits from the works sold in the exhibitions were donated to NATAL- The Israeli Trauma and Resiliency Center.