ART-PRESENTATION: Naama Tsabar-Transboundary
Naama Tsabar creates sculptures, installations, and performances that often transform the exhibition space itself into a musical instrument to be played. With a background as a musician and bartender, Tsabar infuses her work with materials, sounds, and smells taken from nocturnal environments. When interacted with, these objects offer compositions that are both visual and sonic.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Paul Kasmin Gallery Archive
Naama Tsabar presents her solo exhibition “Transboundary” at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. The exhibition features 5 new sculptures, the latest evolution in her “Work on Felt” series (2012- ), an ongoing series of work where raw industrial felt is transformed into modifiable stringed instruments. Through the addition of carbon fiber, piano strings and guitar tuning pegs, the felt pieces gain new features that contradict their natural character. One is immediately confronted with their minimal design and then given a chance to directly engage the work itself by plucking the strings, creating sounds from them. Tightening or loosening the strings changes the degree of the bowing of the sculptures and the sound they make. The transformative nature of the work is such that the appearance of the sculptures, their erectness or flatness, directly corresponds to the pitch they produce. Felt is a material with a significant history in music and art, including its functional application in absorbing sound waves in musical instruments such as cymbals, bass drums, and pianos. In “Infiltration Homogen für Konzertflügel” (1966) Joseph Beuys wrapped an entire grand piano in felt, using the material as sound dampener, both literally and metaphorically. At first glance, Tsabar’s “Work on Felt” series shares a number of formal qualities with their hard edge and post-Minimalist predecessors: Ellsworth Kelly’s shaped canvases, John McCracken’s leaning planks, and Robert Morris’s ‘60s felt works. However, Minimalism’s stern austerity of material and strict geometry is softened in Tsabar’s sculptures by the felt and its curving slopes. During the opening night, Tsabar and her collaborating musicians will perform a new musical composition written on the felts. Activating the works by playing, stroking, pushing, drumming, strumming, and confronting them, they establish a choreography of movement through an energized, sensual encounter. Tsabar has long worked as both a musician and an artist, allowing her to traverse and crossover between the two disciplines. This is her first public performance in New York City since “Composition 20” (7-9/6/1) on the High Line, in that that Performance Tsabar invited a group of 20 musicians to utilize their amps both as a sound-amplifying source and as a pedestal to stand on. Also the artist commissioned 3 composers to craft unique musical scores, all to be performed simultaneously by different sets of the musicians.
Info: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 297 Tenth Avenue, New York, Duration: 12/7-18/8/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.paulkasmingallery.com
