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ARTCAT



Roomful by Nava Lubelski

LMAKprojects
139 Eldridge Street, 212-255-9707
East Village / Lower East Side
October 28 - December 11, 2011
Reception: Friday, October 28, 6 - 9 PM
Web Site


LMAKprojects is pleased to announce 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 canvas and 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; a bright pink electric blanket has its insides pulled out and used to embellish its own surface, the exposed form 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 abstracted 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 tear on a velvet green chair are delineated and embroidered with Lubelski’s signature stitching.

Nava Lubelski’s (New York, 1968) work was recently on view at The Shelburne Museum, VT, The Powerhouse Museum, Australia and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. NC. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design, NY The Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY and the Henry Buhl collection. Her work has been reviewed in the LA Times, The Globe and Mail, Artforum, NY Times, Boston Globe, ARTnews, and the Huffington Post.. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, CUE Art Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation.

For more information about the exhibit or additional images, please email [email protected] or [email protected] or call 212 255 9707.

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