Oliver Laric
Hilla Toony Navok / Rounding Up the Hours
Center for Contemporary Art
2 Tsadok Hacohen St. (near Kalisher St.)
Tel Aviv
www.cca.org.il
Hilla Toony Navok / Rounding Up the Hours
Center for Contemporary Art
2 Tsadok Hacohen St. (near Kalisher St.)
Tel Aviv
www.cca.org.il
20.05.2015 - 18.07.2015
Oliver Laric
Oliver Laric
Oliver Laric
Oliver Laric
Hilla Toony Navok
Hilla Toony Navok
Hilla Toony Navok
Hilla Toony Navok
Images by Youval Hai, courtesy of the CCA Tel Aviv
Oliver
Laric
In May 2015 the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv will present Oliver Laric’s first solo show in Israel.
Difference and repetition are common
subjects for Laric, especially when looking at the productive potential
inherent to reproduction. The copy carries with it the catalysts for its
duplication, alteration, and change. It is an imprint of the process of its
creation, a fossil of its own evolution. The precursor is no better or worse
than its reproduction, but rather both can be valid entities in a multiplicity
that denies the hierarchy between the two in favor of endless variation.
Versions (2012) is
an ode to variability in the form of an ongoing series of video works. They feature
animated sequences recycled in Disney films, postage stamps of ancient Roman
copies of Greek sculptures, Japanese comics that reuse poses and drawing
styles, and a host of sequences that are altered and edited each time Laric
remakes the work. There
are now several versions of Versions, all similar in content and format,
philosophizing variability.
Yuanmingyuan
Columns (2014) takes as its subject matter the
columns of the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) in Beijing that were plundered by French and British troops during
the Second Opium War in 1860. The surviving
columns, which date back to the Qing dynasty, made their way to the KODE Art Museum of Bergen in
Norway via a Norwegian general who served in the Chinese army. The columns were
recently returned to China, but not before they were 3D scanned. The scans are available for download on Laric’s website so that anyone can view or
use them, providing new possibilities for propagation and variation.
Laric's
long interest in variation, in how an image, object, or idea is altered
according to its user's needs or context, seems to have itself evolved from
ideas of copying to the notion of "morphing," a transformation that
alters the very essence of a given thing, rather than repeat or reproduce it.
The video Untitled (2014) is comprised mostly of scenes of character
transformation in animated sequences: Familiar figures
from children’s movies, superheroes, and anime
characters give way to more obscure references, such as a 3D model of a statue
of Hermanubis, an ancient mythical figure combining the Greek god, Hermes, with
the Egyptian god, Anubis, who takes the hybrid form of a human body and jackal
head. Untitled also includes a time-lapse drawing of a “fursuit”
head such as is worn by “furries,” members of a subculture united by a
reverence of animal figures with human characteristics, usually inspired by
cartoons though spanning far beyond.
Cartoons and
time-lapse digital
renditions lend themselves easily to giving form to metamorphosis since they
naturally show a visual process of becoming. The ability to switch from male to
female, or from human to object or animal, provides an outlet for the
transcendence of the self’s limitations and gives way to multiple modes of
self-conceptualization.
Be it through morphing or copying, it is
the distinctions and translations between one thing and another that Laric
explores. His work mirrors back to us a cultural imaginary that takes many
forms, but returns us to the same constant, that of change itself.
Accompanying the exhibition will be a catalogue with texts by acclaimed philosopher and feminist theorist, Rosi Braidotti, and the exhibition curator, Chen Tamir.
This exhibition is made
possible with generous support from the Austrian Cultural Forum and Outset.
Untitled, 2014
4K video, 5:55 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin
Yuanmingyuan
Columns, 2014
Seven 3D-printed polyamide columns, dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin
Versions, 2012
HD Video, 6:40 min.
Courtesy of the artist, Seventeen, London, and Tanya Leighton
Gallery, Berlin
Hilla Toony Navok: Rounding Up the Hours
The CCA is proud to present a new large-scale installation by Hilla Toony Navok.
Hilla Toony Navok tracks
high modernism and abstraction in popular Israeli consumer products in a
practice based on fantastical constructs. Known for her playful sculptural use
of vernacular materials, Navok interrogates the very notion of display. Rather
than simply present ready-mades, she pits consumer and industrial products
firmly within abstraction, voiding functionality in favor of highlighting
design.
Rounding
Up the Hours is a large-scale kinetic installation bustling with raw materials
such as aluminum rods that reference storage spaces and manufacturing
factories, and office furniture, which references administration and desk jobs.
These two pillars of contemporary work culture, known colloquially as “blue
collar” and “white collar” work, uphold a system so refined that it seems to
function on its own. Indeed, this machine-cum-sculpture is an active
work site, but devoid of human presence. Instead, objects such as chairs,
molded to the human body, are anthropomorphized, and move through a
choreography that seems to be dictated by the materials themselves. The objects
are the ones at work, toiling away after work hours without us, yet producing
nothing. Their lack of utility is evidence that they are on display, art
objects; they can even be considered to be drawing in space.
Although Navok’s
installation empties found objects of their utilitarian value and focuses
instead on the elements of design, it isn’t simply about the aesthetics of
work. Nor do the basic shapes and colors, which can be traced back to the birth
of modernism a century ago, refer only to their design origins. The slow and
monotonous movement betrays the Sisyphean nature of labor itself, as alluded to
in the title, Rounding Up the Hours,
and the many components that make up the workforce in which we live. Rounding Up the Hours questions
the very connection between labor and creation, the cultural and ideological
underpinnings of design in the consumer production process, and the
assimilation of the history of modernism in contemporary consumer culture and
our place within it.
Curator: Chen Tamir
Rounding Up
the Hours
is presented courtesy of Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv