Dana Raz’s drawings are small, quick and lean, made with single, one-time, unrepeated strokes. At times one sentence accompanies them, and at others – a solitary word. The link to texts turns the images into shards of life, expanding the simple image to the beginning of a story, a tale that viewers must complete with an resolve also expressed in the changing sizes of the works raw materials. The base for each drawing is the first paper Raz encountered when the sense of urgency pushed her to find sanctuary in the act of drawing.

Each of the drawings marks the seam between word and symbol, semantic and semiotic. The various sketches are like single words assembled on a wall in clusters, becoming bitter-funny lines all dealing in personal experiences, but from a self-deprecating perspective, a place of no forgiveness or consolation. Thus, the texts become an expression and testimonial of double failure – failure to deal with the gap between what was promised and what was realized, and the failure to represent it anew.

Even at the peak of this process of change and creation, we are subject to the system of social rules dictated by others. We are tried for social norms and language boundaries. This is the core of Raz’s drawings: they define the great to gaping divide between who we are and the trial we are forced (and force ourselves) to endure by social structures larger than ourselves.

And so, the fragments of images and texts by Raz are tantamount to deep inhalations and exhalations. They are attempts to regulate breathing because of a sudden urge to veer from the beaten path, to rebel against the demand to submit, to be liked, to make do. If social life was a children’s coloring book, Raz would be a serial “perpetrator” of coloring outside the lines.