Israeli-born artist Orit Raff creates photographs, installations, and video works that suggest intimacy and the private self. The spareness of Raff’s imagery links her work aesthetically with minimalism, but her references to common everyday life and objects also reflect Pop-art sensibilities. For example, the WHITE series, which was created while Raff was at the School of Visual Arts, was made primarily in the private areas of the home. Raff turned neutral objects such as a toilet bowl, bathroom drain, a bed, a bar of soap, and a mirror into cool meditations on hygienic whiteness. For her installation Mobius Strip, images of indentations left on carpet and other sites suggested the floor plan of a recently vacated apartment.

Raff’s Dynamic Equilibrium installation, a version of which was previously shown at The International Studio Program’s Open Studios, “conjures the moment when the domestic becomes unfamiliar, uncanny in its ability to flip from comfort to cold, from manageable to impinging.” The installation includes selections from two recent and related bodies of work. The “freezer series” consists of large, up-close photographs of the interiors of Raff’s antiquated, frost-plagued freezer. Although taken inside the home, these stark, uncomfortable images bring to mind the tragic icy landscapes of Northern Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Another series of variously titled video projects uses a steam room, a Jacuzzi, and a swimming pool filter as settings to depict water in states of movement. The intimate representation of these public spaces, which captures the organic movement of the precipitation, evokes strangely meditative associations with bodily functions.

Taken as a whole, Dynamic Equilibrium examines the slippery balance between the domestic and the alien, the comfortable and the discomforting, the familiar and the menacing.