JERUSALEM — Clara Hirsch, an accomplished artist and wife of Canada’s ambassador to Israel, Jon Allen, recently exhibited her work in the Greater Tel Aviv Area.
Ambassador Jon Allen and his wife Clara Hirsch on opening night of her exhibt in Tel Aviv.
Hirsch’s month-long show, at the Machon Hamayim gallery in Givatayim, was made up of mixed-media works – paintings that incorporated photographs, primarily of her family members. In her paintings, the geographies of Canada and Israel were combined.
The subject of the exhibit was the immigrant experience. The works focused particularly on the experience of the artist’s parents and their children – Hirsch and her brother – who left post-Holocaust Europe to make their home in Canada.
One of the most fascinating elements of the exhibition is the ambiguity of the paintings. The boundaries separating the Canadian and Israeli landscapes are not clear, and the viewer is suspended in some twilight area between Canada and Israel.
Similarly, looking at the paintings, the viewer is also suspended in time, somewhere between Canada in the 1950s and contemporary Israel.
An effective artistic expression of the immigrant experience, the works are suspended in space and time between the old home and the new one.
“Clara Hirsch’s family was only one of many Jewish families that left eastern Europe after the war; impoverished, emotionally damaged and trying to pick up the pieces of shattered lives. The ‘baggage’ these Holocaust survivors carried was figuratively and mentally laden with pain and worry,” the exhibit’s catalogue stated.
“Hirsch’s paintings create a dialogue between images from the past and her present reality. Her paintings are empathetic and moving, constructed with a careful hand, and emerge from a reservoir of gentle and conflicted emotions.”
Her paintings create “a dialectic between her personal familial archive and her present environment. Her works sharply contrast her rekindled connection to her Jewish immigrant past and her life in Israel,” the catalogue stated.
The exhibition’s curator, Doron Polak, wrote: “William Shakespeare wrote that memory is the ‘guardian of the soul’ – and we, as viewers, have no choice but to join her [Hirsh] wandering and experience her feelings as they are represented by her markers in time.”
Hirsch told The CJN that the exhibition is “a marking of time of my immigrant past and my present life in Israel.”
She feels “very much at home in a multicultural society like Israel,” she said, and through her art she tries to convey that she has “empathy for the immigrant experience.”