Friday, September 19, 2025 at 12:00 AM to Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 11:59 PM
18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica
**1639 18th Street -** **Artists' Hearth** Moshe Roas’s works are not monuments but fragile vessels, carrying the residues of touch, craft, and ancestry. Each object bears the labor of hands, the pulse of memory, and the slow sediment of time. They do not declare; they breathe—gestures that drift as if suspended, unsettled yet insistent. The works draw on personal lineages that extend to North African and Oriental traditions of making—threads, ornaments, and ritual objects where devotion and utility are inseparable. In Roas’s practice, these echoes do not appear as ethnographic remnants but as shifting constellations: metal that grows like roots, textile that remembers the body, bronze that preserves the breath of wood. Pain, in this constellation, is not a scar alone but a contour of persistence. What wounds becomes the very form that remains. A golden rod encrusted with spikes and glass tears does not rest in menace, but flickers with allure. Fossil traces carry both deep time and tender touch. Moth wings, brittle and weightless, stand guard over what endures and what escapes. Everything here leans into air, precarious and alert. Objects seem to anticipate their own transience, as if asking us to inhabit not certainty but suspension: a poise that trembles on the verge of collapse, and on the verge of flight. Roas’s practice opens a space where memory and matter converge without resolution—an ambiguous room, narrow yet unbounded, where inheritance remains porous, and where beauty carries the shadow of loss. **Moshe Roas** is a Visiting Artist at 18th Street Arts Center, generously supported by Artis. To see the show, email **admin@18thstreet.org** or stop by the office. **About the artist** Moshe Roas, Portrait, 2025. Photo by Hadas Parush / Haaretz. Courtesy of the artist. Moshe Roas is a Tel Aviv-based sculptor whose work navigates the intersection of modernist principles and alchemic transformation. Blending traditional craft techniques with found and fabricated materials, Roas creates abstract sculptures that evoke traces of an ecological aftermath. His works, often resembling vertebrae, skeletal structures, or enigmatic artifacts, embody a meticulous exploration of form and balance—akin to three-dimensional calligraphy. Roas approaches materials as agents of transformation, integrating weathered wood, metal, and textiles into dynamic compositions. His sculptures encapsulate the tension between softness and danger, inviting both sensory and emotional engagement. A graduate of Shenkar College and Hamidrasha College of Art, Roas has expanded his practice through international residencies and advanced studies. He founded the print workshop at the Petah Tikva Museum of Art and has been teaching printmaking for over a decade. His work has earned him prestigious recognitions, including the Talente Award of Excellence and Israel’s Ministry of Culture Award for Art and Design in Textile Design. His sculptures are held in major collections such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Rosenblatt Collection, and the Shoken Collection. In 2024, he completed a residency at Artport, Tel Aviv. Roas is represented by Sommer Contemporary Art Gallery in Tel Aviv. Through his art, he seeks to bridge absence with presence, turning voids into spaces of beauty, contemplation, and emotional depth. Moshe Roas’ residency is generously supported by Artis.