“14 Days” 2020
In the beginning of March 2020 my partner and I came to visit my parents for the first time since we were together. A few days after we arrived we were asked by the Israeli government to go into home quarantine.
Text, paintings and music are integrated into the video's narrative, sharing a love story between two women, one Israeli and the other American in the time of Covid. The drawings are a marker of the journey that began a year and a half before, spanning between Israel and New York. Set within the earliest days of the Coronavirus that influenced and changed our lives, the video “14 days” begins in the first moments of quarantine as the drawings take a look back at the journey we went through together.
What does it mean to come out of the closet at the age of 30 and what feelings accompany accepting myself as queer. Questions surface around notions of home, sexual identity and starting a family according to accepted norms verses according to the life I desire. Home is a theme that has accompanied me in my work for years and the desire to find a safe place where I feel I belong.
"14 days'' we are quarantined in my parents’ apartment, the place that always symbolized home for me, but the room is no longer mine and the home is no longer mine. As isolation ends and the Coronavirus wanes how will this new world unfold and what will home be next.
Shasha Dothan (b. 1987 Tel-Aviv) is a Brooklyn-based artist working with video, installation, poetry and sound. She creates immersive experiences that connect fragments of her personal history. Exhibitions include the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Petah Tikva; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Erica Broussard Gallery, Santa Ana; American Jewish University, Los Angeles; Jerusalem Cultural Season, Jerusalem; University at Buffalo Art Galleries, Buffalo: Ashdod museum of Art, Ashdod and MCLA Gallery 51,MA . Dothan received an MFA from University of California Los Angeles (2018), and a BFA from Shenkar College (2013). Awards and scholarships include the John Baldessari Family Foundation Scholarship (2017-18); Young Artist Award from the Israeli Ministry of culture (2018); Word prize from AJU; Asylum Arts Grant; Philip & Muriel Berman Foundation Grant (2019) Adams Family Foundation, Young Artist Award (2020) and the Artis residency grant for Vermont Studio center and NARS Foundation . She was an artist in residence at NARS Foundation, Mass Moca, Byrdcliffe and Vermont Studio center. She is a founding member of the art collective Anti Mehikon.
To view more work by Shasha, please click HERE.
