An initial layer weaved around the photographs that compose Ady Shimony’s show, exhibited in the central gallery on the ground floor and the gallery on the second floor, concerns fantasy and imagination, which tie into the exhibition’s title: “Like a Cheshire Cat”, alluding to Alice in Wonderland. This layer serves as the foundation for sensitive identifications of body gestures or their consequences, which take place in all the works featured in the exhibition.
Shimony’s works bring to light the associations between space, surroundings, sexuality/sensuality, 3D and the ways in which all these are interlinked, like communicating vessels. For Shimony, the essential interest in sculptural gestures is ultimately expressed in photography. The identification of cigarette smoke as demarcating a space while at the same time possessing sensual characteristics. Shimony confronts the seeming lightness of the smoke with the corporal presence of a rhinoceros standing on a road at night alongside a negative print of the ultimate positive-negative relations formed between the masculine and feminine body. The images featured in the exhibition offer a multiplicity of possibilities that apply to the same “existing” essence identified in the objects, animals, and human behavior. The dog recumbent on a couch, the squids that were spread out on the beach and the rhinoceros are all affected by a positioning in space by human hands.
The inquisitive nature of the photographic practice according to Shimony requires and practices a large extent of exposure. In effect, the photographed people also position themselves, by their very awareness to the act of photography. The photographed objects are partly sculptures or possible sculptures, which merge or reflect in different manners the self portrait of their photographer.
