The Thing Itself

“The Thing Itself” is the name of a new video work by Jonathan Levy that was screened during his 3-day weekend exhibition, “Suite 511” (Curator Sharon Toval). This work was shot during one full night in suite 511 at the Royal Beach Hotel in Tel-Aviv. The storyline is simple: An older man meets a much younger woman in a hotel suite. They stage scenes for the camera, during which a fascinating discussion develops between the two of them. Jonathan follows her lead, as if not influencing the direction of the discussion, but in reality he is carefully and religiously opening thematic and challenging doorways, on the borderline of gender non-politically correctness yet with intimacy and a lot of sensitivity.
This work offers a focused study about the medium, Jonathan's relationship with Cinema and deep gender topics that affect both men and women. In “The Thing Itself” Jonathan investigates aspects of non-politically correctness by creating unexpected situations that have both meaning and non-meaning in a post-post-modern era, raising questions about subjectivity of the essence and the difficulty to cope with the unknown or the undefined.