About Doron Gazit
Doron Gazit is an environmental artist, ecological activist and a designer whose installations engage the landscape. With nature as his canvas, he reveals invisible currents of nature. His three-dimensional lines and inflatable structures sculpt the air and reflect the sun. They create a dialogue of air, wind, and sun.
Gazit became enchanted with air-filled objects when, as a student of the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, he introduced balloons to Bedouins in the Sinai desert. Rouch, the word for “wind” in Hebrew and Arabic, is also translated as “spirit,” and it is this dual meaning that continues to intrigue and guide Gazit in his work.
With his “Red Line Project,” a series of world-wide temporary installations, his bright red three-dimensional line is a metaphor for the blood vein of mother nature. Gazit is now documenting serious ecological devastations at locations affected by climate change and man’s misuse of the environment. He has placed his Red Line along the sinkholes of the Dead Sea in Israel, among the icebergs of the melting Knik Glacier in Alaska, in the burnt forests and dry lakes in southern California, and in the devastated Salton Sea area. Gazit plans to take his project further to the melting glaciers in Patagonia and Antarctica, the disappearing forests of the Amazon, the Oral Sea in Russia and many more. Unfortunately, the list is very long!!
His “lines” in the landscape, which are literal extensions of the act of drawing, are intended to be interventions, which draw attention to environmental degradation. On these bleak landscapes the Red Line creates haunting images, alerting observers to the urgent need to remedy and protect our endangered environment.
Gazit is now approaching a new stage in his work. The Red Line is no longer highlighting only devastated locations, but also areas in which global warming has already destroyed communities and habitats. Bringing attention to people, who have been forced to leave behind all that they have, and start over somewhere new.
About Doron Gazit
Doron Gazit is an environmental artist, ecological activist and a designer whose installations engage the landscape. With nature as his canvas, he reveals invisible currents of nature. His three-dimensional lines and inflatable structures sculpt the air and reflect the sun. They create a dialogue of air, wind, and sun.
Gazit became enchanted with air-filled objects when, as a student of the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, he introduced balloons to Bedouins in the Sinai desert. Rouch, the word for “wind” in Hebrew and Arabic, is also translated as “spirit,” and it is this dual meaning that continues to intrigue and guide Gazit in his work.
With his “Red Line Project,” a series of world-wide temporary installations, his bright red three-dimensional line is a metaphor for the blood vein of mother nature. Gazit is now documenting serious ecological devastations at locations affected by climate change and man’s misuse of the environment. He has placed his Red Line along the sinkholes of the Dead Sea in Israel, among the icebergs of the melting Knik Glacier in Alaska, in the burnt forests and dry lakes in southern California, and in the devastated Salton Sea area. Gazit plans to take his project further to the melting glaciers in Patagonia and Antarctica, the disappearing forests of the Amazon, the Oral Sea in Russia and many more. Unfortunately, the list is very long!!
His “lines” in the landscape, which are literal extensions of the act of drawing, are intended to be interventions, which draw attention to environmental degradation. On these bleak landscapes the Red Line creates haunting images, alerting observers to the urgent need to remedy and protect our endangered environment.
Gazit is now approaching a new stage in his work. The Red Line is no longer highlighting only devastated locations, but also areas in which global warming has already destroyed communities and habitats. Bringing attention to people, who have been forced to leave behind all that they have, and start over somewhere new.
Testimonials
Artist Statment
As an artist, I believe in the power of art and its ability to bring about social political, and environmental changes.
Art, I believe, can advance and energize social movements that may bring about a revolution capable of salvaging the future of the planet. In the past few years, I have been focusing on The Red Line project.
The Red Line is a metaphor for the artery of a Mother Earth that’s crying out for help. I transpose the artery to various places around the world that have been harmed by global warming and destroyed and sundered by humankind’s stupidity. By means of the Line/Artery I anthropomorphize the earth, hoping that this will help us to understand the magnitude of the difficulties and the problems of the body in decline.
Earth is a living, effervescent body—and now it’s dying!
The Line is minimalistic, very simple, graspable, and immensely powerful. Nature becomes a massively sprawling canvas. The Red Line is a red flag. By wielding it, I try to tug at the viewer’s heart and convey a grim message about the colossal disasters that this earth is experiencing. I try to tell you that each of us must become an activist and a participant in the struggle to save our future.
The Red Line is my artery and yours—ours.
בתור אמן, אני מאמין בעוצמתה של האמנות ובכוחה לגרום לשינויים חברתיים, פוליטיים וסביבתיים.
אני מאמין שיש בכוחה של האמנות לקדם ולהתסיס תנועות חברתיות שיגרמו למהפכה שתביא להצלת עתידו של כדור הארץ.
בשנים האחרונות אני מתמקד בפרויקט הקו האדום.
הקו האדום הוא מטפורה לעורק דם של אימא אדמה הזועקת לעזרה.
את עורק הדם אני מעביר במקומות שונים בעולם שנפגעו מהתחממות כדור הארץ ובאתרים שנהרסו ונחרבו עקב טיפשותו של האדם.
באמצעות הקו / עורק הדם אני מחיל על כדור הארץ תהליך של האנשה, שעוזר להבין את עוצמת הקשיים והבעיות של הגוף הדועך.
כדור הארץ הוא גוף חי ותוסס – ועכשיו הוא גוסס!
הקו הוא מינימליסטי, פשוט מאוד, קליט ובעל עוצמה אדירה. הטבע נהפך לקנבס אדיר ממדים.
הקו הוא גם דגל אדום שבאמצעותו אני מנסה למשוך את הלב ולהעביר את המסר הקשה על האסונות הכבירים שפוקדים את כדור הארץ ועל כך שכולם חייבים להיות אקטיביסטים ולהצטרף למאבק להצלת עתידם ועתידנו.
הקו האדום הוא עורק הדם שלי ושלך – עורק הדם שלנו.
أؤمن كفنّان
أؤمن كفنّان بقوة الفنّ وبقدرته على إحداث تغييرات اجتماعيّة، سياسيّة وبيئيّة. أؤمن بقدرة الفنّ على إثارة وتحفيز الحركات الاجتماعيّة التي تنقذ مستقبل الكرة الأرضيّة.
يتمحور عملي في السنوات الأخيرة حول مشروع الخطّ الأحمر. الخطّ الأحمر هو استعارة لشريان الأرض- الأم التي تطلب النجدة. أمرّر هذا الشريان عبر أماكن مختلفة تضرّرت بسبب الاحتباس الحراريّ، وعبر مواقع دُمّرت بسبب حماقة الإنسان. بواسطة الخطّ/الشريان، أطبّق على الكرة الأرضيّة سيرورة أنسنة تساهم في فهم الصعوبات والمشاكل للجسد الزائل.
الكرة الأرضيّة هي جسد نابض بالحياة- ولكنها تحتضر الآن!
الخطّ أدنويّ، بسيط جدًا، أخّاذ ويتمتّع بقوة هائلة. تصبح الطبيعة قطعة قماش ضخمة.
الخطّ هو عَلَم أحمر يمكننا من خلاله مخاطبة القلوب وتمرير الرسالة الصعبة حول الكوارث المروعة التي تلمّ بالكرة الأرضيّة، وحول وجوب تجنّدنا جميعًا للنضال من أجل إنقاذ مستقبلهم ومستقبلنا.
الخطّ الأحمر هو شرياني وشريانك- شرياننا جميعًا.
About Doron’s Red Line Project, by Peter Frank
“Doron Gazit draws the line not only in the sand, but in the water. And air. And he draws it not with a pencil, but with a package – a self-contained, 3-dimensional, bio-neutral tube traversing landscape space, landscape space to whose transformation he wants to bring our attention. Despite its urgency, Gazit’s art is one of play, and choreographed elegance, and expansive imagination. An artist and designer, Gazit is best known for inventing that floppy figure flapping in front of gas stations and donut shops. But commercialized whimsy is the least of the arrows in his quiver. Long before those giant, bendable cigarettes-with-arms began their dance along the highway Gazit was fretting over the physical condition of the world, exacerbated by the nearsighted politics being waged over it. Now he gives voice to his concerns.
As a longtime Californian, and as an Israeli, Gazit finds himself at the leading edge of the struggle against environmental degradation. His projects sewing miles-long bright-colored balloons – air tunnels, really – through lakes and forests, deserts and cities are proposed not just in aesthetic context, but in a social one. Like Christo, Gazit’s canvas is the troposphere, and mirrors, yet modifies, mankind’s presence there. Unlike Christo, the social aspect of Gazit’s efforts is not in the negotiations among humans towards an artist’s vision, but in the influence the artist’s vision might have on negotiations among humans.
The ‘Red Line’ Gazit introduces into Pasadena at the Armory Center for the Arts is not an extension of the Los Angeles subway, but an extension of the worldwide ecological crisis, specifically manifested in two places, the drought-beset San Joaquin Valley mere miles up the freeway and the equally fraught Dead Sea halfway around the world. These are the projects Gazit wants to realize soonest, stark lines laid across sere terrain as if rendered on maps. Gazit plans to take his Red Line next to the melting icebergs in Iceland and then further around the globe. In Pasadena he has realized his red trails snaking in and out of buildings and streets, a highwire microcosm of global rupture.”
Peter Frank, April 2015