Merav Peleg & Sara Rayo
Israel & USA
Leonura Terminalis (The Deep Sea Medusa)
28” X 28” X 4” depth (framed)
Paper different GSM thicknesses and colours, hand cut, sculpted and painted over, wood frame
Merav lives and works in Israel and has poignant tales (and memories) around summer on the Mediterranean coast. Influenced by Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, specifically the rendition of ‘Summer’, she partners with Sara Rayo to invoke the power of water as a dynamic ever changing form of energy, and therefore generating sound and music by tapping into the forces of nature. Merav says - “Water symbolizes passion and the music expresses it”. Sara made a deep study of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s “Art Forms in Nature” from which she selected his riveting renderings of Discomedusae, deep sea jellyfish like creatures that are so fantastic, that they seem unreal. But they do exist! And in particular the artist duo then selected a particular species for their musical interpretation - Leonura Terminalis. “Summer is the season when the Mediterranean medusas come to the shore”, says Merav very solemnly! And with the migration of the medusas from the deep ocean to the shore, they bring with them their deep ocean dance and music. Vivaldi’s Summer seems a perfect generating piece to what the artists have tried to create - a dramatic work of bio-mimetic art - with many different kinds of movements, tentative pauses as though on tenterhooks (with tentacles poised), massive crescendo bursts, bright neon-like awe-inspiring colours, and drama, as one would rightly expect from deep sea creatures that glow in the dark.