NULL
Michal Gilboa David | Solo exhibition | Hakibbutz-Galley for Israeli Art
Yael Kainy | Curator
The NULL { } sign represents among others, an empty group in mathematics and in other fields.
Only one object is being displayed in the gallery ,a twenty-meter long piece of weaving by Michal Gilboa David (made on 1996), on a loom made of copper wires and rayon. The piece is spread out from the height of the wall at the entrance and dangles throughout the gallery floor. Apart of that the gallery looks empty and white. The structure itself takes on importance; when both stabilizing elements remain exposed: the column in the inner part of the gallery and the cube in the center of the space.
Inside the cube, a video is screened. In the video Gilboa David appears assembling and dismantling the loom. She is inside the loom, hence the image created is one of a corral. Gilboa David tries to discipline the loom's heart to fall into the right place within it. She does it with her own four limbs, with her whole body, as if she handles a marionette on the loose.
The sound of the wooden part of the loom that accompanies this process fills the gallery space from within the cube. The emerging sounds together with the expose white color of the cube points to the cube as the heart to the gallery and reminds of the gallery's collection until very recently.
This exhibition is a kind of farewell ceremony to the loom and what it represents. The last time (before selling it), Gilboa David builds it in the gallery's central space and dismantles it, as if she bisected an animal and she memorizes in various ways its appearances and its existence.
Drawing a floor in a white acrylic, drawing graphite on the wall, embossing on watercolor paper the heart of the loom - all of these are a precise and meticulous inventory of all parts of the loom, according to the order of their assembly. The artist created them in Sisyphean process involving body touch on different bedding. She invites the viewer to walk and add his foot marks to the floor carpet.
As if the artist had borrowed the concepts of time associated with her work, her weaving on the loom and her body movement related to it, into a world of drawing. Memorizing what she had unloaded and had already given up on it and allowed the walls and the floor of the space she had inhabited, to carry its memory. In doing so, she expresses the irrelevancy of the loom to the present time and to the current values.
The use of the term { } as the name of the exhibition seeks to invite the decomposition and the void as ground for new growth
Written by Curator Yael Kainy December 2017
* All Photographs by Nir Alon