13 Feb 2010

METAMORPHOSES: ERROR at Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv

METAMORPHOSES: ERROR

Ofri Cnaani -- Tamar Halpern -- Vlatka Horvat

Braverman Gallery is pleased to invite you to the opening of a new exhibition featuring the works of Ofri Cnaani, Tamar Halpern and Vlatka Horvat.

METAMORPHOSES: ERROR features three artists who explore ideas of transformation, reincarnation, and constant change. The works all present transitions of one thing into another, as well as shifts of a greater scale. The show explores strategies of making, making do, messing with, reconfiguring and retaining.

Like a biological mutant, a forgotten mythology or a bugged program, the works always represent some sort of failure: an error in re-formatting. These 'shifts in plans' are reflected in both the images and the processes, the results often both pathetic and magical.

Ofri Cnaani presents a series of a portable, low-tech moviemakers made of overhead projectors and rotating Plexiglas disks. The moviemakers churn out short movies (24 frames per minute) by placing various 2 or 3D objects on a transparent disk, allowing their various physical qualities to cast images on the adjacent wall. The outcome is a low-capacity-visual-memory machine, which cannot record more than one minute, but that loops infinitely until the objects on the disk are moved. Unlike a cinematic experience, this sculptural configuration makes no attempt to hide its means of production. The equal attention to projector and image seeks to explore the tension between reality and illusion. The works lie between the traditions of nomadic-circuses and today's DIY media-space. Cnaani works with film celluloid, spray paint silhouettes, paper cutouts, and broken glass and mirrors. Technological failures are artificially encouraged to create all sorts of magic and tricks. The brief and often whimsical movies toy with the nature of perception, exposing blind spots and challenging preconception about visual entertainment. Cnaani also presents a series of ceramic plates, crafted as part of an on-going project focused on dismantling a pseudo-repair. In a one-off performance, Ofri Cnaani will use one of her DIY moviemakers to create a series of real-time movies. 'Vanishing Woman' deals with magic, trickery, the dawn of cinema and the archives of the Israeli Kibbutz movement. In 'Turn Tables', the musician Grundik (of Grundik and Slava) collaborates with Cnaani in jam session of image and sound. During the performance in Tel Aviv, Grundik will appear live via Skype from London, while Cnaani assembles a real-time movie.

Utilizing digital and traditional photographic processes, Tamar Halpern explores, amplifies, and disrupts the legacies of modernist abstraction. By juxtaposing computer-generated imagery and repeated process of re-photographing and re-printing Halpern presents images that seem suspended in a state of flux. Halpern's process is an on-going, rapid metabolism of capturing and processing, shaping and fracturing. Through strong affiliation with modernist abstraction, Halpren presents her own version of photo-based gesture when she employs an additional physical layer in her process. Subjecting the print to chemical intervention, she rubs the finished print with paint, smearing and affecting the surface of the colored paper. Ultimately, Halpern's photo-based works resist attempts at categorization. They are at once captivating and chaotic.

Vlatka Horvat's Anatomies depicts a set of disembodied limbs in dance-like arrangements with their own mirror image. In this series of seemingly endless permutations and variations, the body is distorted into abstract symbols and ornaments, removed from reference to the real. These forms are re-imagined as new forms that evoke Borgesian Imaginary Creatures: bodies that are all limbs. In the series Anatomies and Arrangements the body is presented at the brink of abstraction - at once immediate and removed, familiar and strange, recognizable and grotesque. Horvat's forms are revealed as a set of possibilities, as potentials for movement and reorganisation. In Repurposed, Horvat presents a series of playful proposals that re-imagine the space of Forum Stadtpark gallery as a site with a myriad of uses. The proposed interventions and alterations range from practical and plausible to ridiculous, mischievous, troubling, and utterly inappropriate, and propose to turn the gallery into a hospital, a refugee camp, a wrestling arena, a farm, among others.

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Ofri Cnaani (born in Israel, 1975) lives in New York and works in Video and Large-scale Video Installations as well as drawing. Cnaani graduated from Hunter Collegeʼs MFA studio program in 2004. She is currently completing a large-scale commission to create 10 site-specific video installations at 10 museums of contemporary art in Italy's Lombardy region. Cnaani is a Six Points Fellow and was twice the winner of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation award. One-person exhibitions include: Twister, Network of Lombardy Contemporary Art Museums, Italy; Andrea Meislin Gallery; NYC, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv; Pack Gallery, Milan; Haifa Museum of Art, Isra el; Herzlyia Museum of Art, Israel. Group exhibitions include: Moscow Biennial, The Kitchen, NYC; Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYC; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Arnolfini Foundation Museum, Bristol, UK; Tel Aviv Museum; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Prague Triennale among many others.

Tamar Halpern lives and works in New York. She received an MFA from Columbia in 2005. Her solo show at D'Amelio Terras Gallery in New York Office Baroque Gallery in Antwerp, will open this spring. Past shows include: Marvelli Gallery, New York (2009); Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago (2009); On stellar Rays, New York (2009); John Connelly Presents, New York (2008); White Columns, New York (2007), Artforum, Berlin (2007); Eleven Rivington Gallry(2007); New York (2006) Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2006) among others.

Vlatka Horvat (b. 1974 in Čakovec, Croatia) is a New York-based artist working in a range of media — from photography and works on paper to video, installation and performance. Her first US solo exhibition, titled Or Some Other Time, opened in January 2009 at the Kitchen (New York), where she also presented a performance work Once Over. Other recent exhibitions include For Example, a project developed for the 11th Istanbul Biennial, Red Thread at TANAS Space in Berlin, an 8-hour performance This Here and That There at PACT Zollverein in Essen and at Outpost for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and exhibitions at Galerie Xippas and Galerie Anne Barrault (both in Paris), the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, McKee Gallery, White Columns and Rachel Uffner Gallery (all in New York), the Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam), as well as Home Works IV festival in Beirut and Art Sheffield 08 (in collaboration with Tim Etchells).