Hannah Traore Gallery is pleased to present Noa Yekutieli: The intimacy of distance, the artist’s forthcoming solo exhibition in New York. Featuring all-new works created for this show, The intimacy of distance explores the tension between merging and separation, reflecting on the complexities of identity, belonging, and the balance between creation and destruction. Through a combination of hand-cut paper, wood, and textiles, assembled together in a puzzle-like manner, Yekutieli invites an engagement with and meditation on what separates and unites us.

Born in California to Japanese-Israeli parents, and later growing up in Tel Aviv, Yekutieli’s coming of age in a multicultural household shaped her perception of the world as a multi-layered place with no absolute truths. Feeling like a bridge between cultures and places, Yekutieli learned to piece together different realities for herself. The intimacy of distance channels these fragmented realities, accentuated by the intense contrasts of the past year: the artist’s journey into motherhood and childbirth amidst the harrowing realities of violence and death in Israel-Palestine.

In bringing new life into the world and reckoning with the fragility of existence during a time of painful conflict and loss, Yekutieli examines how cycles of creation and destruction are intertwined; how generational patterns of trauma and violence seep into the most intimate aspects of life, often becoming so ingrained that they disguise themselves as normal. Working with fragments—through manually cut paper and wood—Yekutieli creates visual parallels between imagery of destruction and nature, which the works’ figures carry almost unnoticeably as clothing, highlighting the unsettling ways in which destructive patterns become rooted and normalized in our everyday lives.

Laborious, meticulous, and manual, this process is inspired by the artist’s Japanese heritage. It is intentionally slow and meditative, creating an emotional channel to contemplate the human potential for change and healing. Yekutieli enters a non-cognitive state of observation, reflection, and empathy from which her figures are born. These silhouetted wood carvings encounter their busy tapestry of surroundings with a near-uniform wistfulness, even gloom, often enclosed by soft-white frames. Yet they remain in motion: riding boats, preparing food, and consoling each other as they reach, lean, and peer. They, like Yekutieli, keep a delicate balance between preserving themselves and merging with life’s jetsam and their peers. That melancholic distance, and its grounds for reflection, remains a thesis for Yekutieli’s work.

Ma (間), the Japanese word for ‘negative space’, translates literally to ‘space between’. Rather than it being a separating line creating a boundary, Yekutieli examines these boundaries in her work as a space of connectivity. She explores how a boundary is a distance between two things that, inevitably, changes with time. Yekutieli asks: what if, when we think of borders, we think of spaces? The concept’s expansiveness includes beginnings and ends, and for Yekutieli, the relations that characterize motherhood, partnership, and place. Her works are channels of convergence and flow, like veins, and clearly defined moments of Ma. In creating a space shy of either complete connection or separation, she paradoxically allows both in concert. The intimacy of distance is a means of finding oneself in patterns, the opportunities and dangers that sit at a precipice, and the harmony of a life lived in plural concurrent states, where all visions, real and imaginary, coexist.

Noa Yekutieli (b.1989) lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. As a Japanese-American-Israeli, she uses objects, crafts, and heritage techniques to nurture her sense of belonging. She engages various mediums, including installation, assemblage, and a signature manual paper-cutting technique to explore personal narratives and multi-hyphen identities within the context of immigration, assimilation, and conflict. She has staged solo exhibitions at ISCP, the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, the Maxxi Museum, Galerie Russi Klenner, Knust Kunz Gallery, Inga Gallery, Galerie Gisela Clement, Kunstverein Augsburg, Track 16 Gallery, Art Cologne, Galerie Sabine Knust, the Nakanojo Biennale, Open Contemporary Art Center, Treasure Hill Artist Village, Sommer Frische Kunst, Gordon Gallery, Artist House, the Janco Dada Museum, The Wilfrid Museum, Mishkenot Sha’ananim, and Marina Gisich Gallery. She was awarded the Harpo Foundation Grant (2023) and the Artist Grant (2022 and 2023), and has taken part in residencies at ISCP Residency and the Gottesman Etching Center. Her work has been collected by The Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Modern Art.