Michal Gavish
By transferring imagery from specific high rise buildings and their surrounding houses into my own imagined spaces, my recent prints and paintings completely flatten and reorder architectural space. I am shaping entire streets and neighborhoods into compact, hive-like structures that mimic the growth of natural crystals, which I have worked on as a scientist. The resulting works on paper are based on a combination of manipulated personal photographs and internet maps using silkscreen, photo transfer, graphite and watercolor painting.
In Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities," the fundamental idea of place comes under assault and is in some ways erased. J.M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" accomplishes much of the same literary feat, erasing or obscuring details while heightening a sense of place through quotidian life within an edge of the empire fort. Jorge Luis Borges too, in stories such as "The Aleph," dissolves specificity of place and invokes a blossoming of possibility through brisk evasions of nationality and time. All these writings find a greater art in recontextualizing places, a strategy that can be both disorienting and engrossing. And all these authors, in these instances, break down the context for their art, undermining the readers' efforts to orient themselves, and creating observations that openly flirt with timelessness and transcendence. Such evasion/evocations of place find visual analogue in the flattened or spiraling inventions of artist Michal Gavish.
A recent graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, Gavish earned her MFA in painting, in 2008. Her previous background includes a PhD in Physical Polymer Chemistry from CUNY and a career in applied scientific research. Her descriptions of the process that begins a work of her art relate to the process of "crystal initiation" in a laboratory context - in her art, in many cases, Gavish has replaced the substrate for crystal growth with a substrate of maps, such as the expansion of Buda and Pest from the banks of the Danube river.
Different environments or substrates will affect a crystal's properties. Changing the substrate on which you grow semiconductor materials, for example, results in changing their electrical conductivity. I worked on pharmaceuticals in Switzerland that change the crystal's growth pattern, leading to variations in the rate at which drugs dissolve in our body. I have also conducted experiments using ice crystals, whereby changing the material on which we grew the ice changed the water's freezing point (this was used for a patent we made on artificial rain).
Gavish has called Tel Aviv, Basel, New York and Palo Alto home, and a sensibility of being from everywhere and belonging nowhere is evident in the generic nature of repetitive photographic forms in her art. The absence of a horizon or any illusion of depth of field forces the viewer to confront the entire piece all at once, a crush of building facades. Through a method of her own invention, Gavish transposes her many former homes and neighborhoods from crisp snapshots to bleeding washes of silkscreen, creating images that reflect the distortions of dreams or memories, the free floating, simplifying and fallible effort of trying to recall any one place, even those we've called home.
Politically, this devolution of place may refute ideas of nationality or any identity grounded in place. The opposite of nostalgia, the viewer is left with no sense of belonging. As the authors mentioned above explore larger human patterns by evading solid ground, Gavish pastiches images in a way that heightens the tension between the specific and universal. In particular Gavish has explored the uncertainty inherent in the country of Israel, where her parents emigrated when Hungary was absorbed behind the Iron Curtain of Soviet block countries in the 1950's. In an effort to find peace, one depicted home becomes dislocated and so must be transposed into a new, more neutral context. A sequence of Tel Aviv apartment buildings may tuck itself safely into the volcanoes of Iceland or the mountains of western China. Gavish's Urban Tapestries, softly colored multiple layers of place hang translucent on acetate over a background image of serigraphed buildings on paper. These drape from the walls in a curving swoop that lufts with any passing movement of air.
A lack of orientation challenges the ancient human urge to locate ourselves and know our surroundings. Individual identity and social purpose break down and can be "re-grown" and reorganized through the device of such dislocations. At its heart, Gavish's art is a process of reconciliation with moving from place to place, and finding solace in an uprooted sense of home.
By transferring imagery from specific high rise buildings and their surrounding houses into my own imagined spaces, my recent prints and paintings completely flatten and reorder architectural space. I am shaping entire streets and neighborhoods into compact, hive-like structures that mimic the growth of natural crystals, which I have worked on as a scientist. The resulting works on paper are based on a combination of manipulated personal photographs and internet maps using silkscreen, photo transfer, graphite and watercolor painting.
In Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities," the fundamental idea of place comes under assault and is in some ways erased. J.M. Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians" accomplishes much of the same literary feat, erasing or obscuring details while heightening a sense of place through quotidian life within an edge of the empire fort. Jorge Luis Borges too, in stories such as "The Aleph," dissolves specificity of place and invokes a blossoming of possibility through brisk evasions of nationality and time. All these writings find a greater art in recontextualizing places, a strategy that can be both disorienting and engrossing. And all these authors, in these instances, break down the context for their art, undermining the readers' efforts to orient themselves, and creating observations that openly flirt with timelessness and transcendence. Such evasion/evocations of place find visual analogue in the flattened or spiraling inventions of artist Michal Gavish.
A recent graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, Gavish earned her MFA in painting, in 2008. Her previous background includes a PhD in Physical Polymer Chemistry from CUNY and a career in applied scientific research. Her descriptions of the process that begins a work of her art relate to the process of "crystal initiation" in a laboratory context - in her art, in many cases, Gavish has replaced the substrate for crystal growth with a substrate of maps, such as the expansion of Buda and Pest from the banks of the Danube river.
Different environments or substrates will affect a crystal's properties. Changing the substrate on which you grow semiconductor materials, for example, results in changing their electrical conductivity. I worked on pharmaceuticals in Switzerland that change the crystal's growth pattern, leading to variations in the rate at which drugs dissolve in our body. I have also conducted experiments using ice crystals, whereby changing the material on which we grew the ice changed the water's freezing point (this was used for a patent we made on artificial rain).
Gavish has called Tel Aviv, Basel, New York and Palo Alto home, and a sensibility of being from everywhere and belonging nowhere is evident in the generic nature of repetitive photographic forms in her art. The absence of a horizon or any illusion of depth of field forces the viewer to confront the entire piece all at once, a crush of building facades. Through a method of her own invention, Gavish transposes her many former homes and neighborhoods from crisp snapshots to bleeding washes of silkscreen, creating images that reflect the distortions of dreams or memories, the free floating, simplifying and fallible effort of trying to recall any one place, even those we've called home.
Politically, this devolution of place may refute ideas of nationality or any identity grounded in place. The opposite of nostalgia, the viewer is left with no sense of belonging. As the authors mentioned above explore larger human patterns by evading solid ground, Gavish pastiches images in a way that heightens the tension between the specific and universal. In particular Gavish has explored the uncertainty inherent in the country of Israel, where her parents emigrated when Hungary was absorbed behind the Iron Curtain of Soviet block countries in the 1950's. In an effort to find peace, one depicted home becomes dislocated and so must be transposed into a new, more neutral context. A sequence of Tel Aviv apartment buildings may tuck itself safely into the volcanoes of Iceland or the mountains of western China. Gavish's Urban Tapestries, softly colored multiple layers of place hang translucent on acetate over a background image of serigraphed buildings on paper. These drape from the walls in a curving swoop that lufts with any passing movement of air.
A lack of orientation challenges the ancient human urge to locate ourselves and know our surroundings. Individual identity and social purpose break down and can be "re-grown" and reorganized through the device of such dislocations. At its heart, Gavish's art is a process of reconciliation with moving from place to place, and finding solace in an uprooted sense of home.
