Circus Fashion Project

This exhibition presents two new video works.
 
“The perfect Human” depicts the perfect male model in the image of Ron Jeremy, a famous Jewish porn-star who has stared in thousands of movies in the 80’s and the 90’s. The reference, taken from Jorgen Leths’ film from 1967 with the same name, places Ron Jeremy as the sublime idol to whom Yona is trying to conform through failed attempts to fit his posture and gaze.  Yona’s hopeful stares towards Jeremy’s groin are sobering up to the realization that the perfect man can only be adored.
 
In “The Backdoor Man”, a 17 min film composed out of dozens of porn films from the 80’s, from which the sex scenes have been taken out, Yona plays the double of Ron Jeremy. Yona’s character is portrayed as an impotent character trying to get into the porn industry but faced time after time with the demand to take its clothes off, and the fear it involves. The film takes place in a fictional twilight zone that moves between the art world (where openings, studio visits, and newspaper reviews take place ) and the behind-the-scenes of the adult film industry, and specifically the making of the movie “The Backdoor Man”.
 
Taking out the sex scenes and moments of penetration from the movie’s “plot” leaves the characters in what can be thought of as the worst Melodrama, one that takes place in cheap sets and is overwhelmed by fake sentimentality and empty pathos moments. The porn flick loses its ability to fulfill the fantasy and becomes a cheap soap opera.  Yona’s character as Jeremy’s double is silent, passive, paralyzed by fear from the task it has taken upon itself. Ron fails as well (trying to become an artist), and becomes human again. The movie shares moments of coherence between the two characters who share the same destiny.
 
Yona enters through the ”backdoor” without any way to affect what is happening, and just like in a dream, or a nightmare, the plot turns him into a different kind of “backdoor man”, one that lives through identifying with the film’s hero, the perfect man, the fantasy.

The Backdoor Man

A comic thriller that takes place in a TV show studio setup. The artist is dressed up as four different competitors in a Japanese game show called "The human Tetris". Each character in his turn tries to fit into an upcoming shape and to pass through it, by incorporating extreme body gestures, stretches and flexes. If he fails at doing so, he shall fall into a big swimming pool that is placed behind him.
The movie focuses on the characters' effort and process of preparation towards the upcoming shapes, but never shows the act in which they pass or fail through them. The Sound that follows the action implies on their failure at passing through their given challenges.
Eventually,  collaborating in an effort at passing through an extremely challenging shape: the word L.O.V.E, they succeed at doing so.

The Human Tetris 

A trilogy that presents a fictional world in which fairies are the only commodity that exists. Each part of the movie presents the viewer with a different stage in the production and consumption of fairies.A sweatshop that manufactures fairies. A redneck that sleeps on a rocking chair while fairies with male head fly above him. POV flight into a neon sign. the main actor acts as different characters in the movie, changing identities and thus providing the viewer a total and autonomic experience. 

Fairyhead Solo Exhibiton

"Refined hyperrealism, aesthetic asceticism, Multi – progressive traveling, Interactive
multi-dimensional, there is a lot to mock of " (Jean Baudrillard, America, p.48)
Ilan Yona celebrates capitalism with humor and self-awareness. His Baudrillardrian
world celebrates the social-moral distortion by deconstructing the visual narrative with
intelligent use of cinematic language. Yona creates ex nihilo, builds hyper-reality, flooded
with overused images & cinematic cliché. His fairies are mass production pieces, and refer
to the only promised fantasy they hold. His characters are an extreme replica and a byproduct
to Consumerism.
Ilan Yona’s work motivates itself out of a strong urge to work within the boundaries of
familiar genres. By appropriating the genre and twisting its rules of action Yona creates
silent sabotaging acts. He melts together the various types without considering hierarchies
of cultural and commercial, personal and social, arts and crafts. Yona creates pastiche
by combining techniques of animation, three dimensional pre-visualization, video and
photography thus creating replica clichés of the genres he manipulates. The distance
created between Yona’s work and the original source, whether iconic or taken from
readymade image banks, allows him to raise discussion that exists on the axis between
the biographical and the social.
Yona duplicates himself, changes roles and parts in his idyllic fantasy. He is the good, the
bad & the ugly in a local suburb western, a flock of fairies, an army of laborers, a useless
redneck and characters from a Japanese TV show who demonstrate the word ‘LOVE’ with
their body (taken from a new video work that is in progress). Yona investigates a world
where the distortion takes place as an exaggerated-hedonist-nihilist-capitalist party that
lacks any moral reference, an Idyll Distortion.

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