TSABAR – DVIR
Dvir Gallery is delighted to announce “Layers and Formations”, an exhibition by Israeli-born, New York-based artist Naama Tsabar. This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo show in Paris, her fifth solo show with the gallery, on view from March 30 until May 6, 2023.
Naama Tsabar’s practice fuses elements from sculpture, music, performance and architecture. Collaborating with local communities of female identifying and gender non-conforming performers, Tsabar writes a new feminist and queer history of mastery. Her interactive works expose hidden spaces and systems, reconceive gendered narratives, and shift the passive viewing experience to one of active participation. The artist draws attention to the muted and unseen by propagating sound through space and sculptural form. Resting someplace between sculpture and instrument, form and sound, Tsabar’s work lingers on the intimate, sensual and corporeal potentials within these transitional states.
In Tsabar’s Work on Felt series, slabs of felt are layered with carbon fiber and epoxy to create works that are sculpted through the tension introduced by piano strings. Each Work on Felt has a set of microphones that picks up the vibration which is then amplified by a guitar amplifier. The merging of felt and carbon fiber lends felt, tension and rigidity. The hybrid material subverts expectations: no longer the dampener of sound (reminiscent of Beuys’ use of felt), but the resonating chamber itself.
In these works, sound and form are in a direct relation – the shape is determined by the entry and exit points as well as the length of the piano string, while the pitch of the string is changed with the shape of the work.
The Work on Felt series can be seen as referencing the history of both Post-Minimal and Fluxus sculpture: from Robert Morris to Joseph Beuys’ social sculptures. However, it is equally in dialogue with the work of the 1970s conceptual sculptures and performances of Terry Fox and Paul Kos.
Tsabar began the ongoing Work on Felt series in 2012, with large floor-based sculptures. In 2015, the first wall felts were exhibited introducing a new nocturnal color palette of dark blue, black, bordeaux and purple. In these latest Works on Felt, Tsabar introduces a new color palette that is suggestive of warm desert landscapes with colors of copper, sandstone, and graphite. A gentle shift, through color, from an urban nocturnal landscape to one related to the earth. This shift suggests an expanded reading of the works’ curves and twists as landscapes of slopes and geologic formations.
In addition, Tsabar debuts in “Layers and Formations” the first Overlap Diptych, a variation in which two separate-colored felts are layered on top of each other moving together through the tension of a single string.
In her newest works from the ongoing Gaffer series, instrument cables travel through fields made from layering numerous strips of gaffer tape, the same material used to mask and stabilize cables in performance spaces. The monochromatic field of tape holds the cables suspended in different visual compositions as they flow in and out of the rectangular frame. The suspended cable compositions play on the border between the geometric and the erotic. While the layering of tape transforms the gaffer field into an elusive surface, reminiscent of both organic materials, such as leather, and industrial materials. In these works, Tsabar continues her interest in gaffer tape as a hidden utilitarian material within a performative order – a material she first used in her works Twilight (Gaffer Wall), 2006 and Encore, 2007. This series moves the tape from the unseen location on the stage floor to its scrutable position on the gallery wall. Tsabar specifically calls attention to the hidden labor associated with the material through the meticulous layering of the tape, creating a significant thickness and a subtle textural rhythm of lines on its surface. She further calls attention to the labor involved in their creation by naming those who contributed to the act of “gaffering” in the credit lines of the work. These artworks refuse to be confined to a single category, borrowing from elements of painting, drawing, and sculpture. They hinge the functional and the visual; while the cable running through the work can be read as a gestural mark, and the tape itself a color field, the works never lose their potential to actively transmit sound.