Hilla Toony Navok at Klubovna Gallery / Brno

Hilla Toony Navok / WALLMARKS

08/03 - 03/04. 2017

Klubovna Gallery

Francouzská 33 Brno

















When Hilla Toony Navok visited Klubovna for the first time, she has decided - inspired by the gallery floor - to work with its space. Navok was attracted by the strange and senselessly organized tiles. Two floor colors, red and beige, two diverse "spots" that visually divides the space of Klubovna without apparent purpose.

The word "divide" is crucial for the exhibition WALLMARKS. Navok divides the space, copy rectangular shape of beige tiles just behind the entrance to the gallery. Forces the viewer to walk around the walls that define the new space. Despite its apparent monumentality, colored walls are fragile, thin and "temporary". Temporality is based on the nature of the material that is used for defining the space. PVC curtains, which in our conditions are mainly used in industrial buildings and warehouses, in Navok’s country are more visible in public space - used primarly to protect fast food stands or bistro gardens from unpleasent weather conditions during a winter. They define protected areas.

For the exhibition in Klubovna Gallery author has designed her own color combination of walls, their sizes, location of meshes, pockets and transparent windows - vistas - that ensure their functionality.

"Vista" is another crucial moment in the exhibition WALLMARKS. Navok encourages the viewer to look through several plans. In the gallery space, as well as outside on the sidewalk in front of the window of Klubovna, there are several ideal spots where it is the best to look at the installation. Complex image, that we see, refers to the source of such treatment of plans. We can decode a similar principle in Navok’s collages. Collages bacome a part of the installation and the last objects in the vistas. Layering continues in collages but logically, we encounter the limits of two-dimensional image.

The works of Hilla Toony Navok focuses on deciphering the abstract and formal sources or aesthetic codes of everyday reality. In the public space she finds its visual loops or exposes those, that invade our private spaces by unified mass production of home decor and daily commodities. By her working methodes she touches the concept of design as such, she tests its capabilities and pushes its limits.

Visually Navok uses sets of "her" colors, which she strictly keep. It is a sort of aesthetic obsession of puristic tuning. Colorful layout of the whole installation originates on the drawing. The drawing is the seed that starts to inflate, vibrate and at some point get on the surface of the entire installation.

Navok in her works uses cheap and common materials such as foam, carpets, wires, folders, plastic objects of all kinds and shapes combined with objects of everyday use, always with a single objective - to achieve a perfectly tuned composition. This way she refers to the tradition of minimalism, in the form of raw materials, that piles up different layers and in consequence is a continuation of convulsions of postmodernism.

text by: marta fišerová