Ilit Azoulay @ Andrea Meislin Gallery, NYC - 7th option

Ilit Azoulay: 7th option

Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York

November 5 – January 16, 2015

Coinciding with ILIT AZOULAY’s inclusion in The Museum of Modern Art’s Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015 exhibition, Andrea Meislin Gallery presents a 7th option, the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. 

The concurrent exhibitions feature large-scale photographic installations that suggest the ways that history is constructed, organized, and perhaps manipulated. In these works, Azoulay continues her excavation of urban layers and their hidden histories.

Ilit Azoulay began this new series during a residency at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Channeling the spirit of archeologist, historian, and urban explorer, she traveled around Germany collecting and photographing objects and architectural fragments. Some structures she chose were undergoing restoration; others had been reconstructed precisely, brick by brick, following Germany’s restoration laws. Then Azoulay embarked on an intensive process of investigation, researching each fragment she had photographed. 

Her two massive photographic installations recombine those images into intricate puzzles that tease the eye and the mind. Combining her lexicon of images—architectonic and decorative, art-historical and vernacular, funerary and monumental—Azoulay creates an open-ended narrative that the viewer is invited to complete.

These pictures from Germany are the basis of Azoulay’s interconnected  installations. Shifting Degrees of Certainty, the installation at MoMA, consists of 85 individually framed photographs arranged in a format that evokes at once a rebus and a map of a medieval city center.

In the 36-foot-long panorama at Andrea Meislin, the images from MoMA appear in a new, theatrical configuration. The title of the gallery exhibition, a 7th option, refers to one of the possible stories the panorama suggests.

In a publication accompanying the gallery show, curator Jonathan Touitou highlights a selection of fragments and objects from the 85-piece Shifting Degrees of Certainty lexicon. In his text Touitou offers a newly imagined story from his personal experience of the work.

ILIT AZOULAY (b. 1972) lives and works in Tel Aviv. She is a recipient of the Gerard Levy Prize for a Young Photographer, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and the Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Artist, Tel Aviv Museum. In 2014 she presented one-person exhibitions at the Kunst-Werke, Berlin, and the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, and was nominated for the Prix Decouverte – Les Rencontres d’Arles. Ilit Azoulay’s works can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, The Israel Museum, the Herzliya Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum, the Shpilman Institute for Photography, and many notable private collections.

ANDREA MEISLIN GALLERY

534 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

andreameislin.com

Maayan Strauss @ Andrea Meislin Gallery, NYC - Seven Sinks

Maayan Strauss: Seven Sinks

Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York

January 29 – February 28, 2015

Andrea Meislin Gallery presents Seven Sinks, an installation by Brooklyn-based artist MAAYAN STRAUSS. The site-specific installation incorporates photography, sculpture and sound.

Maayan Strauss’ Seven Sinks is designed as a perverse model kitchen countertop. Where one would usually find a single basin, complete with polished chrome faucet atop a marble countertop, Strauss has placed seven. The expansive counter that fills the gallery space resembles more closely the interior of a kitchen showroom than an art gallery.

The installation speaks to the ways in which the sink—one of the most basic elements of domestic life—can reflect class and status, and despite its ever-presence, can be transformed into an object of desire. Presenting the relationship between art, domesticity, and consumption, the work highlights the commercial framework and economic reality in which it exists.

In 2012, when Maayan Strauss created the first iteration of this piece, entitled Counter Sink, she approached Kohler—a main purveyor of American plumbing fixtures—to contribute the sinks necessary for her project. In “commissioning” the commercial entity to submit the sculptural elements of the work, Strauss reversed the common relationship between artist and corporation—the latter typically commissioning the former.

In treating the sinks as ready-made material, Maayan Strauss alludes to the discrete transformation of the object from utilitarian hardware to luxury commodity.  The placement of the sinks within a gallery space speaks directly to the very systems of consumption and valuation represented by the ready-made. In rendering the gallery as the ultimate showroom, Strauss creates a more aggressive brand of ready-made that actively engages with its politics and rhetoric.

While Seven Sinks may seem to be a standard, manufactured product, at second glance it reveals itself as an elaborate crafted water fountain. The water that drips and flows from the faucets is synchronized to flow and drain in a continuous cycle, creating a rhythmic sound that immerses the viewer in the experience—and simultaneously renders the sinks off-limits for use by viewers.

A closer look at Seven Sinks reveals that the marble countertop is in fact a high-resolution photograph of Carrera marble, taken by Strauss, and mounted on the wooden island’s surface. With the water in the sinks splashing up onto the printed surface, the image will deteriorate over time, giving the installation life as an artwork that is in constant flux. The faucets and sinks are used as sculptural material in this installation, which emphasizes their qualities as designed objects, but also points to their function and dysfunction. In activating the ready-made and bringing it (back) into use, Maayan Strauss suggests the paradox of its dysfunction.

Maayan Strauss’ interpretation of this utilitarian object strips the sink of its use and universality. The running water turns the whole installation into an object, which in turn functions as a physical framework for expanding on, and departing from the same systems that it represents. 

ANDREA MEISLIN GALLERY

534 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

andreameislin.com