There are plenty of checks and balances in “The Daedalus Enigma,” an exhibition of ready-mades, collages, prints, drawings, videos, and sound works created by Pnina Shalvi, currently on show at the Agripas 12 Collective Gallery hidden away off a quaint, peaceful square just down the road from the hustle and bustle of the Mahaneh Yehuda shuk.
The eponymous character is, of course, the chap from Greek mythology who thought he could defy gravity and human constraints and flap his way to the heavens.
Shalvi is clearly enamored by Daedalus, whom she calls “the archetype of the first scientist, the genius inventor who challenged gravity and made the first human wings.” Fair enough. But she is not blind to his faults and flaws.
She also describes him as possessing “the wonderful spark of human genius” and says, “the heroic, the sin of hubris, and tragedy are simultaneously intertwined in the story.”
The show fittingly incorporates and embraces oxymoronic confluences, seemingly contradictory storylines, flipside sentiments, and a range of disciplines and aesthetics.
“My art is not necessarily positive,” Shalvi states. “It has positivity but has both sides. I am a worrywart; I have been existential since I was three years old.”
Three? “Since I can remember,” Shalvi chuckles. Perhaps that fits the daughter of the late renowned Israel Prize-winning professor and pioneering educator Alice Shalvi.
Then again, there is an element of one’s earliest formative years that Shalvi is more than happy to embrace.
“I feel there is a common denominator between children and artists. I call that wonder – or even astonishment. That is the wonder of the beauty of the world, the curiosity.”
That all sounds delightful, but it wasn’t long before the antithetical side came up.
“But there is also the wonder of the cruelty. The world is equally beautiful and cruel.” That is quite a philosophical purview to work with and across which to spread one’s creative wares.
Shalvi says there is a poetic sense to the exhibition, which she suggests is really a single work of different parts. “I feel that exhibitions are works of art in their own right. Many artists say that.”
Curator Bitya Rosenak has certainly added her penny’s worth to the proceedings and, together with the artist, has crafted a compelling continuum across the compact facility’s display spaces. There are colors and shades that reverberate and resonate with each other and an almost subliminal spread of textures, corporeal or implied.
On the teeter-totter
True to the complementary seesaw sensibility, Shalvi has put the detritus of contemporary life – and the consumer society – to good visual use by assembling intriguing arrangements of, for example, product packaging waste that proffers an ambit of material and shading nuances in 3D.
The exhibits also vary in size. One tiled assemblage of monochrome images covers a large chunk of one wall in the main viewing space, and there are almost imperceptible slivers dotted around the place in unsuspected spots that add some comic seasoning to the brew.
“That’s a photo of a relative,” Shalvi laughs. “And here’s one of my uncle in a suit,” she gaily adds. The latter gent was snapped, in pretty formal attire, way up in some towering mountain range complete with summer snow gracing some of the knife-edged rocky slopes.
The counterpoint motif recurs everywhere you look, including in the works forged from stuff that ordinarily would be consigned to a garbage dump if not to a recycled waste container. Shalvi looks at both ends of the consumer spectrum here.
“There is the technology, and there are the very simple things like packaging. They once contained some object or product which was manufactured by someone. Actually, someone designed and produced the packaging, too. They are so beautiful!” she exclaims. They do say one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
There is a transformative core to “The Daedalus Enigma,” which is not exactly breaking news when it comes to the bottom line of an artist’s labors. But Shalvi constantly straddles the extremities of conceptual, visual, and existential presence. “This ‘packaging’ is normally consigned to the garbage heap, but it is so beautiful.”
IN THE context of the gallery, one gets her point. After all, isn’t art, and the display thereof, very much a matter of context?
One only has to think of modern art pioneer Marcel Duchamp’s choice of a porcelain urinal as his entry to the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Palace in New York in 1917. Duchamp explained his line of thinking by saying that such ready-made items were “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice.” That idea certainly resonates with Shalvi’s ethos.
As does the notion of the individual and the collective.
“There are many fragments here,” she notes. Indeed, there are, and Shalvi posits that this reflects the basic dynamics of life.
“It is a matter of dismantling and assembling. That is the tension of life, the experience of life. We sometimes fall apart ourselves before we pick up the pieces again,” she smiles wryly. “In cognitive terms, reality is very fragmented, and our brain amalgamates everything in order to provide us with an anchor, something stable we can hold onto within this reality. The experience of life is fragmented.”
The poetic undercurrent to the Daedalus spread resurfaces. “Bitya also said this is more like poetry than a story. Poetry is a collection of words that form all sorts of images. And there is no clear picture at the end.”
That is part and parcel of visual art, too. The artist works away in his or her studio – or other creative space – and eventually delivers a series of creations that are matched and set in some sort of coherent order, normally by a curator, to produce an entity of parts that, it is generally hoped, in unison adds up to more than the sum of the individual items on display.
Free-flowing
There is an ebb and flow feel to the whole show.
The collages comprise seemingly incongruous pieces that somehow add up to a harmonious, well-balanced whole. In fact, the entire exhibition is shot through with yin-yang momentum.
Photographs of extremely large sites, such as lunar craters, are reduced to diminutive proportions. There is also a curious arrangement of black, winged shapes that add up to something that may be an arrow, bird, or whatever the observer discerns.
The artist’s intent, in fact, leans toward the thematic, ambitious, mythological man, although she is open to third-party interpretations. “It is a plane, a totem with wings, or it could be Daedalus or Icarus.” The latter was the wing-bearing offspring in the myth who flew too close to the sun and perished.
The counterbalance to that work covers the full length of the wall, along the floor. It is composed of thousands of tiny shiny black shards that appear to meander aimlessly. Shalvi has also left circular spaces at various junctures across the black, almost volcanic mass, suggesting yet another nip-and-tuck twinning.
“That resonates [with] the craters in the photos on the opposite wall,” I venture. The artist is happy to go along with that.
The two-way street continues. “There are equals and opposites here,” Shalvi says. “There is also a gender span here. Many of my heroes are men. And I am completely non-male,” she adds with a laugh. She references the linear drive of the male of the human species and the more circular route taken by women. “Why should one want to fly? This ambition to go off in some direction – that is a male thing.”
EARLIER SHALVI, 58, had informed me that this is her first solo show and that she only decided to become a full-fledged artist at the age of 40. That sounds very much like an ostensibly masculine move, to opt for a singular trajectory when one is some way past one’s first flush of youth.
Shalvi sticks to philosophical rather than personal climes. “There is this ambition to break through the human borders,” she observes.
The “Daedalus Enigma” is very much a site-specific offering. Not that all the works were created for the show, but the curatorial input and the intriguing liaisons at the gallery add up to a harmonious whole, albeit with plenty of minor keys thrown into the lyrically visual score.
There are terrestrial and celestial vignettes which, again, follow the pendulum motion line of thought. There is a large tome with double-spread astronomical illustrations lying open on a stand near the entrance to the gallery. A magnifying glass, taken from the printing world of yore, sits on one page, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the minutiae of the heavenly bodies before zooming out again.
“That was my father’s magnifying glass,” Shalvi remarks.
Oh-so Jerusalem
Shalvi is a relative newcomer to the Agripas 12 collective, which has been going for over two decades now, joining the team 18 months ago. There have, naturally, been personnel changes over the years, but there is a homey, back-alley Jerusalem feel to the whole venture. The artists support one another’s work, often curating for one another, as is the case with the current show.
The gallery floor, with its worn yet still pretty tiles, conjures up the intimate ambiance that Jerusalem once exuded. That also suits the Shalvi exhibition with its staccato multifarious feel. As the tower blocks and skyscrapers continue to proliferate across the capital, at least this little corner of town maintains its comfortably unassuming character.
“This is a very Jerusalem gallery,” Shalvi states. “This whole neighborhood is very Jerusalem.” As is the artist who was born in the capital and now resides in her parents’ old house.
The gallery may be a snug fit for its physical and socio-political environs, but Shalvi wants us to look beyond the immediate vicinity.
“The gallery is very Jerusalem, but the exhibition wants to take people far beyond this spot, to look beyond their horizons to different spheres.” I note that it follows the concept of the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly city, referenced, inter alia, by the Ramban (Nachmanides).
“It all fits,” says Shalvi. “We are here on Earth, but art aspires to loftier realms.”
The ‘Daedalus Enigma’ closes on April 10. For more information: agripas12gallery.com/