Life looks so good when its reduced to bitesize. Sai Alon’s delicious handmade diorama explores architecture and the way spaces are gendered on a small scale. Shweta (2018) is a kitchen scene, in which the artist imagines an eighty-fourth birthday celebration has just taken place—but in the absence of figures an action is assumed, for the viewer to fill in. Part of a series of unpeopled scenes, Alon recreates spaces that are traditionally thought of as feminine, domestic dwellings and private quarters where women encounter themselves and one another, and where conversation and creation often happen. The diorama series is part of an exhibition opening today in Tel Aviv featuring five female artists working with crafts considered feminine (ceramics, dioramas, sewing, and embroidery) responding to the ideas of the feminine in the everyday but reappropriating them in a kind of ceremonial celebration.
