With a great eye and extreme patience, Michal Taharlev develops these handmade images, a series entitled Holes in the Memory. For each piece, the Tel Aviv-based artist recreates old family photographs with just a single needle, poking thousands of tiny holes in the canvas to produce the faces and forms.
Through the use of positive and negative space, Taharlev translates old memories into new ones. The laughter, smiles, portraits, and family moments are, up close, merely an abstract collection of dots. But, from a distance, the spaces blend together into detailed images, presented to the viewer in a new and unique way. The artist says, “The use of a needle on a photo and the violent act of damaging and obsessing over memories, yet in a very strict manner, gives a new meaning to the innocence and the unknown future the photos hold.”
