Artist Portrait: Itai Almor

For the Man Issue, Fuzz interviewed artist Itai Almor, SY ’20, about his photo series Iati (My Manly Triptych), and how drawing and performance relate through the body in his work.

F: Describe your practice.

IA: My practice is changing right now. It’s been mixed media objects that feel handmade and exist somewhere between illustrations (in the sense of the modern market of images) and heirlooms or memorabilia. I hope they make people reflect on the “things” that shape their ideas of past and future. But lately, moving forward, I’ve been doing more installation and performance based work: costuming and painting on my own body and framing myself in constructed sets, but still thinking about similar topics.

F: Can you talk about the relation between the performance and drawing?

IA: I learned to draw from my own body in a mirror. For a long time I drew grotesque, mangled figures. I came to understand my body through the lens of, and as a tool for performance. I was doing a lot of theatre at the same time, learning to communicate emotion, to be expressive through shaping the body in performance. The expressive content of my drawing became bodily.

F: In what sense does this piece relate the two?

IA: The paint in the piece is not representative of anything, other than the very basic gesture of ‘making art.’ So there’s the aspect of the body and the body’s representation. It feels related to the making process, as that is something I use to identify myself, something I’ve staked my identity on. I was interested in the idea of my body being somewhat visible through the plastic, but through a shadow, being at odds with my own image — two foiled characters in the one body.