Naama Tsabar at Dvir Gallery

Artist: Naama Tsabar

Exhibition title: Dreams Are Like Water

Venue: Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

Date: July 17 – August 28, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Dvir Gallery

Dvir Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of Naama Tsabar ‘Dreams Are Like Water’.

Tsabar (b. 1982, Israel) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

For this exhibition Tsabar focuses on works that use removal as a means of exposure. Exhibited for the first time are Tsabar’s ‘reversed collages’ made with The New Yorker magazines. These works were conceived on the heels of the pandemic lockdown in NYC, spring 2020. The artist cuts into the iconic cover pages of the publication to unearth images and words embedded inside. In Tsabar’s words it was a process of “digging and removing as a means of searching and reflecting, poems for a changing world.”

In ‘Untitled (Without), V3’ a negative flag is flown. A new variation to a work first exhibited in Ballroom Marfa, Texas. The shape of a flag is cut out, leaving only the fabric around it. The fabric is made of white strips put together with threads that match the color of the LGBTQIA+ flag. Suggesting that perhaps identity is far more subtle than the bold symbols and objects that attempt to represent us.

Also debuting in the exhibition is the sculpture ‘September 1st 2018 – January 15 2021’. The first work in a new series in which the artist inserts a working metronome to the sole of her shoes. The title of the work is the framing of the time in which the shoes were worn on a daily basis by Tsabar. Her body moving through the object, sculpting it through use. Both the presence and the absence of her body play a center role in these new works. Mundane objects that are both keeper of movement and time. The shoe-metronome work is connected to a new set of works focusing on metronomes, specifically related to her recently inaugurated public sculpture, ‘Equal Measure’ on view through March 2022 on Manhattan’s prestigious High Line.

Naama Tsabar’s practice fuses elements from sculpture, music, performance and architecture. Her interactive works expose hidden spaces and systems, reconceive gendered narratives, and shift the viewing experience to one of active participation.

Tsabar draws attention to the muted and unseen by propagating sound through space and sculptural form.

Between sculpture and instrument, form and sound, Tsabar’s work lingers on the intimate, sensual and corporeal potentials within this transitional state. Collaborating with local communities of female identifying and gender non-conforming performers, Tsabar writes a new feminist and queer history of mastery.