Skylight Gallery Presents
DEEP BLUE
Recent work by
Aphrodite Navab & Lisa Zukowski
February 28-April 3, 2011
OPENING RECEPTION March 3rd, 6-9pm
Skylight Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its second brilliant show of 2011-Deep Blue, Recent work by Aphrodite Navab and Lisa Zukowski. The show will run from February 28-April 3, 2011. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 3, at which the artists will be present.
Both artists use active and participatory means to accomplish healing on personal, cultural, and global levels. Out of these practices comes art that is revelatory and much deeper than meets the eye. Both artists take personal experience, roll it up, shred it apart and send it out to the collective conscious in the form of their transformational work. Prominent blue in their pieces calls to mind a calm and peaceful state, and bursts with pulsing, radiating energy. This energy of blue has an attractive, engulfing and leaves-you-wanting-for-more quality rarely present in much contemporary work.
Aphrodite Désirée Navab’s performance-based photography series: Super East-West Woman’s Sufi Dance: Egypt is motivated by her desire to humorously and compassionately critique the cultures that she embodies: Iranian and American. She does this by using her own body to counteract the evil concept that each culture holds of the other in attempt to alleviate the vilifying energies propagated by political figures and decisions that are highly visible and powerful in the media.
Navab has morphed her chador (Farsi for Islamic covering) into a cape. Our Western ‘Superman’ is transformed into ‘Superwoman’ with a fabulous Islamic cape of agency. She pokes fun at herself, her cultures, and the ludicrous situations in which her life between East and West has placed her. Cultural displacement has given her the capacity to live out her healing vision. Armored with her Persian amulets and Greek anti-evil eye bracelets, Super East-West Woman chases away the evil for which each nation blames the other. Her timely work is magnified in importance as it was set in Egypt. Her Sufi dance for peace and union signals a profound message in light of the suicide bombing in Alexandria outside a Coptic church on New Year’s Day and the current protests and clashes in Egypt.
Lisa Zukowski’s latest series, Clootie, reflects her desire for and practice towards healing and change. It is both a lament and a celebration. Zukowski shreds her own discarded clothing in a symbolic gesture of destroying old ways in the hope of creating a better new reality. The original structure of the clothes are destroyed, buried in wax, and transformed into something positive. Originating from a personal desire for transformation, the works have come to represent the universal desire for healing and change.
Clootie Wall is an ongoing installation initially exhibited in Beacon, NY in November 2010. It is an interactive work consisting of a mesh wall upon which hundreds of strips of rags are tied. After shredding her unwanted clothing and linens and dipping them in indigo, Zukowski tied them to the mesh. Each rag on the wall represents a wish or a hope for healing and change. The viewer is encouraged to participate by writing a wish on a rag and tying it onto the mesh, adding their wish to the wall. Powerful interaction calls for the audience’s commitment along side and in support of the artist’s transformation making the entire process that much stronger.
The personal transcends through the artist to the collective whole of society and to the universal oneness of life itself in theses works. The artists use the powerful color blue and the fabric of their lives to cause healing, metamorphosis, and revolution. A must see show.
The exhibition will run from February 28-April 3, 2011. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday from 10am until 4pm. The gallery is located at 538 W 29th St. NY, NY 10001. For more information or inquiries, please contact Gallery Director Carla Goldberg at 646-772-2407, or via email at info@skylightgallerynyc.com.
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