August 06

Portfolio: Nava Lubelski
by Nava Lubelski
p. 3 of 3

Her work is deceptively simple. Actually, the task of sewing thin threads is often painstaking, and spending hours in the studio, half listening to books on tape, is routine. Yet the end product is not so dissimilar to the source material: remnants of a person’s clumsy or wound-inflicted moment, a family’s meal or some other questionable activity that produces ‘stains’. It is that moment that is remembered or discarded that Nava picks up on, cherishing the time to heal and fix. Her images, while lovingly created are almost violent signposts, casts and bandages smothering the original marks, like a smaller-scale, crafted Christo.

In many of her works, I sense an affinity to the broken glass at a Jewish wedding. This glass-shattering represents, among other things, that marriage, like life, is a fusion of the celebratory and the challenges. Here, Lubelski’s fusion of color and form shards splayed across the ‘canvas’ prompt our losing sight of the original intention or form, as it becomes subsumed in the newer art work. While a new order and balance is created, undeniably a mutation of sorts.

- Bara Sapir