Feathers and rumbling: Toolbox highlights independent art

The 12 artists whose work was featured in the show had all participated in the Jerusalem artist accelerator program called Toolbox.

By JOSH LOGUE
A featured Toolbox artist manipulates an assortment of metal sheets and bowls, in concert with her guitar and audio equipment. (photo credit: JOSH LOGUE)
A featured Toolbox artist manipulates an assortment of metal sheets and bowls, in concert with her guitar and audio equipment.
(photo credit: JOSH LOGUE)
Walking into the Toolbox art showcase in the German Colony around 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday was a little like walking into an outdoor sound-mixing booth for an earthquake movie.
One of the featured artists had arranged an assortment of metal sheets and bowls on a raised bed near the courtyard entrance, and by manipulating the objects in concert with her guitar and audio equipment, she produced deep, haunting rumbling and screeching sounds. Offputting, but also not quite like anything you’ve likely heard before – definitely a unique sound.
The 12 artists whose work was featured in the show had all participated in the Jerusalem artist accelerator program called Toolbox.
“We think that these days, an artist has to know how to do everything,” said Einat Ashdot, who started the program five years ago to give young Jerusalem artists the tools to live and work creatively in the city. “We believe you can’t just be an artist who does the art, and finds some other guy to take care of all the dirty work.”
With Toolbox, under the auspices of the New Spirit (Ruah Hadasha) nonprofit, Ashdot works to impart practical skills and knowledge that young artists won’t have learned in school.
“They study for three or four years at the art school about how to design their unique concepts in art, but not about what to do the day after school,” she maintained, adding they don’t learn about marketing, raising money and building budgets, nor about who works in the city, who they can cooperate with and what’s going artistically in the capital. “The main idea was to give them the toolbox to get by in the real world.”
At first they catered specifically to live performances, but the program has since expanded to include a variety of mediums. Tuesday’s annual showcase featured photographers, filmmakers, musicians and live performers.
Later in the evening, on a large outdoor stage blanketed in what looked like feathers, two performers alternately danced, writhed, jumped or lay still, sometimes flinging the feathers frantically or sweeping them up into piles as live music played and the backlit stage shifted from deep purple to violet to yellow to white.
Ouria Tadmor, a freelance photojournalist and artist whose work was also featured at the event, said he spent 10 years taking photos that went right into his drawer – and “without this program, they would have stayed there.”
In addition to those practical tools, he noted, the program also provides a community and support system.
In an exercise early on in the program, each of the artists received feedback from all the others.
It turns out, Tadmor detailed, “people are very interested in what I had to say. I didn’t know that.”
Now, after 10 years, he has a book out; his photos, all focused on transit and transportation in Jerusalem, will hang in galleries.
He’s exactly the kind of independent artist Ashdot is trying to support and keep in the Holy City.
“We have the students and we have the big institutes [in Jerusalem],” Ashdot stressed. “But we don’t have enough of the small dance groups, the new musical groups or the independent artists who still don’t belong to this institute or another.