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See the Sights I Art Tour

As the saying goes, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” – at least it is so for these five Israeli artists who repurpose old parts, soda cans, driftwood, etc., to create sculptures, toys, and one-of-a-kind objets d’art / By Meital Katz From trash to treasure Can man Joseph Weiss “It all began when I visited the Red Bull exhibition in 2004, where I discovered all the can designs”, says

seventy-year-old Joseph Weiss, who worked at EL AL for 43 years. “My son had some empty cans lying about and he decided to try and build a motorbike out of them. I offered to give him a hand and the rest is history”. Indeed from then on, Weiss became enthralled with the art of can sculpting. After the motorbike, he built a cart, a carriage, and on and on, constantly enhancing his sculpting skills as he went along. Today, some of his work can be seen at the Holon Children’s Museum where a permanent exhibition of his work has been on show for the last six years.

Nir Ohayon I Photo: Igal Bareket

Treasures out of trash Nir Ohayon

“I was a real garbage man as a kid”, jokes eco-artist Nir Ohayon, now 52, “we’d find industrial junk at the rubbish tip and play with it”. After the army, Ohayon began sculpting, making flowerpots with faces made of plaster and where the plant would serve as the hair. His flowerpots were a great success, and he took them to LA where he lived for eighteen months selling his creations at local street fairs. When he returned to Israel, he sold his flowerpots at the Tel Aviv Nahalat Binyamin street fair. When he started to get a little bored with the flowerpots, he moved on to making bigger sculptures and taking part in art shows. The first work

he exhibited was a chair made of recycled parts. He later went on to design a ten-meter couch for the Hiriya Ecological Education Center. “The greatest moment of all was when Janet Jackson saw one of my chairs and asked to use it in a clip”, says Ohayon, who has been participating in art shows in Israel and abroad since 2004. Most of the raw materials he uses in his work, he finds on his way from his home in Jaffa to his studio in the south of Tel Aviv, which is filled with his sculptures of animals and creatures of his invention, made of materials such as shoes, pieces of wood, tires, metal, and more.

Joseph Weiss I Photo: Joseph Weiss

22 ATMOSPHERE MAY 2024