LAMINATED EARTH
Created by artist and architect Sharon Yavo-Ayalon and curated by Lola Ben-Alon, Laminated Earth transforms the confined lobby of 10 Times Square into a sparkly golden dream.
Spanning across disciplines, Laminated Earth is a site-specific multimedia installation that reconciles architectural representations of housing while drawing from land art practices of raw soils and synthetic matter. The exhibition extends to an enormous electronic billboard at 41st and 7th with video art, taken from a performance of the artist who builds, destroys, and then rebuilds her own nylon home, inhibited by madness and the premise of immigration to a better land. A challenging juxtaposition of art and advertising is accompanied by architectural symbols to create a new paragon of public art.
The exhibition mediates between the personal and collective homes while engaging in the obsessive preservation of raw soils as an increasingly eliminated resource. Entering the exhibition, the viewer realizes that not all that glitters is gold but rather a muddy dirt matter on plain nylon. Laminated Earth is both the action and the outcome, the process and the object, where the viewers are invited to explore Yavo Ayalon’s multidisciplinary contemporary art practice and her unique perspective on land art, performance art, and architecture.
The art and biography of Sharon Yavo-Ayalon are directly intertwined. In her work, Yavo Ayalon makes references to her childhood landscapes at the Israeli Kibbutz while contemplating land histories and her relocated housing experience in the USA. The soils used in the exhibition were extracted by the artist from Goshen, a village in upstate NY that is named after the Biblical Goshen in Israel. At a broader level, the artist’s obsessive preservation of the raw earth is perpetuated towards a future in which humankind will be laminating all the natural earth soils on the planet, asking what does it mean to work with a material that has been moved and shuffled around, built upon, plasticized, laminated, and slowly—eliminated.
Spanning across disciplines, Laminated Earth is a site-specific multimedia installation that reconciles architectural representations of housing while drawing from land art practices of raw soils and synthetic matter. The exhibition extends to an enormous electronic billboard at 41st and 7th with video art, taken from a performance of the artist who builds, destroys, and then rebuilds her own nylon home, inhibited by madness and the premise of immigration to a better land. A challenging juxtaposition of art and advertising is accompanied by architectural symbols to create a new paragon of public art.
The exhibition mediates between the personal and collective homes while engaging in the obsessive preservation of raw soils as an increasingly eliminated resource. Entering the exhibition, the viewer realizes that not all that glitters is gold but rather a muddy dirt matter on plain nylon. Laminated Earth is both the action and the outcome, the process and the object, where the viewers are invited to explore Yavo Ayalon’s multidisciplinary contemporary art practice and her unique perspective on land art, performance art, and architecture.
The art and biography of Sharon Yavo-Ayalon are directly intertwined. In her work, Yavo Ayalon makes references to her childhood landscapes at the Israeli Kibbutz while contemplating land histories and her relocated housing experience in the USA. The soils used in the exhibition were extracted by the artist from Goshen, a village in upstate NY that is named after the Biblical Goshen in Israel. At a broader level, the artist’s obsessive preservation of the raw earth is perpetuated towards a future in which humankind will be laminating all the natural earth soils on the planet, asking what does it mean to work with a material that has been moved and shuffled around, built upon, plasticized, laminated, and slowly—eliminated.
date:
2022
collaborators:
Sharon Yavo Ayalon
location:
ZAZ10TS Gallery, 1441 Broadway, New York, NY 10018