Eran Nave: Hunchback Clock
Recipient of the Rappaport Prize for a Young Israeli Artist, 2019
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Eran Nave solo show constructs an office environment, where nature seeps through the cracks. It is composed of improvised furniture sets, upon which a sculptural landscape grows, as if it was a diorama of a neglected backyard. These function as islands for dream-like events; the subconscious of the office desk. The furniture-sculptures are positioned on a wall-to-wall carpet and illuminated with a bright fluorescent light, which together form an institutional façade behind which ghosts and spirits emerge, constituting the terror realms of human experience.
The back-space features five sound sculptures called "teleporters". They function as loudspeakers and emanate a soundtrack that was composed by the artist especially for the exhibition. Made of hollow wood that serves as a sound box, they wear naïve robotic faces. Each sculpture plays a different sound channel, and when playing simultaneously, their voices compose a harmonic musical segment, as if they were a tribal chorus performing a spiritual-religious ceremony.
In his works, Nave creates objects that seem to be soaked in an emotional hot tub composed of sadness, anxiety, amazement and longing. He regards the inanimate as living and bestows it with qualities and expressions. On the one hand, the objects, the sculptures and the paintings are all laden with human feelings, and on the other, the human body is deconstructed, like a rebellious flight of limbs in which every object or limb demands its independence in the world. Through the social-office ritual, Nave constructs an environment that livens emotional margins, where too-brittle love exists alongside death, and terror is laced with humor.
The exhibition is accompanied by a vinyl record titled Clock Class, featuring the music tracks played throughout the gallery (Vinyl record – available in the Shop)
Installation view
Photo: Elad Sarig
The exhibition and catalog were made possible thanks to the Bruce and Ruth Rappaport Foundation.
