Dan Allon 
Contemporary Art

Freeze - mix media installation, 2m x 17m meter mural, 4 sound works, and three booklets, 2024 

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The project is a multidisciplinary composition, dealing with anxiety and depression. It is made of overlapping a large-scale graphic novel, spread across large-size murals, three comics booklets, three original songs, and a 10-minute sound work. Ideally, the spectator should be following the story linearly, reading the novel by the order. 

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The linear reading performance-like walk unfolds a story in three stages: 

(1) Three meetings and/or encounters of Allon with his psychologist, who suggests he come up with a weekly list of "5 things he's taken responsibility over this week", to cope and balance his emotional state, and the introduction of the personification of Oyzis,  Greek Mythology God of depression, in a cartoony-form of water (teardrop, constant rain, and puddles).

 

(2) Five Walls that tell short but effective and punchy stories that demonstrate the continuous state of depression, and are the list Allon was suggested to come up with. The stories show difficulties and violence at work, fear of losing aging parents, sexual misconduct, broken heart, drug use, parenting questions, and career hardships. 

(3) Three songs, of original composition and lyrics, that act as sad duets between Allon and Oyzis—those to be heard intimately by the spectators, after scanning QR codes. In the installation space, there's a 10-minute sound work, composed by voice messages Allon sent his psychologist, and that serves as the documentary element of the work, while the graphic novel itself evokes questions about mockumentary and documentary artwork. 

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Over all of that, lay the hum of the war/genocide in Gaza and the northern part of Israel, and the political decomposing of the country, which raises the anxiety levels, and increases the intensity of depression. 
 

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