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Urban Legends

 

With a series of 10 fabricated stamps, Urban Legends is tracing the way myths are being shaped into national symbols. This project imitates the aesthetics of official postage stamps and uses them to portray popular Israeli urban legends, instead of heroic myths.

Urban Legends, installation view at HaMidrasha Gallery, 2005

Urban Legends resides on the border of truth and deception, authenticity and forgery. The ‘low’ traditional stories are elevated into national truths when they reached their destinations with state postmarks.  

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Urban Legends, Indigo print with perforation, 7 x 5", 2005

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The final stage in this project was putting the stamps on envelopes and mailing them.

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At the bottom of the envelopes, there are visible marks of the post office digital scanner, while at the top right corner there are some manual stamps marks. Urban Legends stamps were apparently unrecognizable to the post office computer and went through a manual inspection by a postal clerk. Hundreds of stamps are created worldwide every year, and not all of them are embedded in the digital postal system. The clerk had a split second to decide whether these were real stamps or not. 

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All the stamps in this series successfully passed inspection and reached their destinations with official postmarks. 

Spreads from sketchbooks, 10.5 x 16", Mixed media, 2005

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