Israeli performance and video artist Tamy Ben-Tor’s work continues the legacy of character-driven art or entertainment acts by Eleanor Antin, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Silverman, and Tracey Ullman. Using her expressive face, voice, and body, Ben-Tor writes and performs hilarious and unsettling monologues that examine personal and societal anxieties, contradictions, anger, and analysis.

This selection of recent videos showcased the artist’s use of comic timing, verbal gymnastics, low tech editing, ethnic music and attire. In Izaak, 2008, a meditation on stereotypes, tradition and taboo, Ben-Tor uses field recordings, puppetry, pornography, and select subtitles to force the viewer to make sense of the variously awkward comic vignettes. In Normal, 2006, she portrays a blathering young artist, describing the numerous e-mails that define her social and professional obligations. The End of Art, 2006, shows Ben-Tor doing a wicked impersonation of the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija discussing his notorious practice of cooking Thai food in galleries and museums, and an opinionated art critic discussing her powerful objectivity.

Tamy Ben-Tor was born in Israel and currently lives and works in New York, NY. She has had solo shows at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Cubitt, London; and Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, and has participated in group exhibitions at the Mori Museum, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; as well as the PERFORMA 05 and PERFORMA 07 Biennials, New York.