NYAB Event - Nava Lubelski "Roomful"

Nava Lubelski "Roomful"

LMAKgallery

This event has ended.

LMAKprojects presents Nava Lubelski's third solo exhibit with the gallery, titled "Roomful". The exhibit continues her exploration of imperfection and randomness, the use of sewing and paper construction, extending the canvas into a sculptural element. The new works question the value of the unique, and of craftsmanship, in a work of art.

In the exhibit Lubelski uses vastly different surfaces to hold her organic sewing, from a chair, to an eviscerated electric blanket, to a factory reject of misaligned army badges. The objects have been discarded as useless, yet still have a sense of presence and of history, of quietly embodied dramas. Their mass produced designs may contain little aesthetic intention or craftsmanship, but Lubelski's detailed hand stitching is worked throughout their patterns creating a new identity; a chair becomes a sculpture, and a blanket a drawing. The work draws attention to the beauty of the structure and repetition and points out imperfections, which in turn alert the viewer to the unique qualities of the object.

As definitions and original intent are put into question, so is the gallery space. Roomful engages the viewer by extending off the wall and out of the canvasand redefining the physical boundaries of Lubelski's work; a heap of black cotton scraps, appearing as fragmented pattern pieces, are stitched and stretched taut into a web-like installation, filling the back wall of the gallery with its shapes and shadows; abright pink electric blanket as its insides pulled out and used to embellish its own surface, the exposed from taking on vaguely modernist references of scrawls and lines; a machinery malfunction causing a damaged batch of manufactured army badges, becomes a subject for Lubelski's repair and attention; an elderly woman's art school drawings from the 1940s are reconstructed as an abstract cityscape, perched atop the portfolio that held them; holes in a stitched canvas open onto views of another canvas; an organic spill is stylized and reproduced as a factory-embroidered series; the marks and stains of wear and on a velvet green chair are delineated and embroidered with Lubelski's signature stitching.

[Image: Nava Lubelski Detail of "First Cavalry" (2011) Machine embroidered fabric and hand stitching 60 x 36 in.]

Media

• Drawing
• Prints
• Sculpture

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