Embroidered Action
“Whispers”Curated by: Hadas Maor
Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art
2004
Embroidered Action is a group exhibition that explores various works of art based on the use of “soft” materials (thread, wool, fabric), synthetic materials (lycra, latex) and other “alternative” materials (paper, masking tape, steel wool) vis-à-vis “rigid” artistic contexts derived from the rudiments of the modernist perception as defined and established since the mid-20th century. The exhibition features the works of ten prominent contemporary artists, local and international, created in diverse media, including sculpture, photography, video, sound, installation and performance. The majority of the works on display were created especially for the show.
In October 1999 Nelly Agassi staged a double exhibition entitled No Stepping Outside the Lines and No Touching the Floor, simultaneously featured at the Camera Obscura Gallery and Borochov Gallery, Tel Aviv. At Camera Obscura she installed a series of large-scale objects that circumscribed the space: cascades of red wool that emanated from the wall and draped downward to the floor: monumental, total, flowing. The use of red wool, the creation of a state of excess and the flow of the material into the exhibition space referred at the time, inter alia, to a situation of loss, metaphorizing an open, bleeding wound.
Agassi’s current dress piece, Whispers, seems to complete a circle with regard to the aforementioned, earlier work and complement it. Executed via dense, dynamic and thick knitting, the upper part of the dress is made to fit Agassi’s dimensions, whereas its lower part stretches circularly and extends in the space, in similar manner to Agassi’s structural dress works from recent years. Since the knitted wool is not uniform, the unfolding surface creates a mass of matter, color, form, thus eliciting an organic, topographical sense, a sense of a voyage through a landscape that may appear like a lake of blood, on the one hand, or like an open route containing infinite different paths of movement: mountains, valleys and creeks, on the other.
It seems that as years go by, the landscape unfolding in Agassi’s work is not only an inner, private, urgent or radical landscape, but also a landscape that strives to expand the boundaries of its possibility toward new realms, a geological, tectonic landscape, attesting, through its very essence, to the element of temporality underlying its existence. Indeed, Whispers, like other dress pieces by Agassi, began in a performance situation, during which Agassi filled the volume of the dress; upon its conclusion, however, the dress remained hanging as a redundant cover, a skin that had been shed, a slough through which the body had grown.
Consultation, cut, and sewing: Ronen Raz
Knitting and textile technician: Doron Ze’evi
Thanks to Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, for supporting the production of the work.
Read Hadas Maor Text about the show here
Preparation Drawing