CHINCHILLA / Sivan Nishri
Text: Ory Dessau

For her solo exhibition at the Maya Gallery, Sivan Nishri chose the title Chinchilla, which she derived from the term ‘chinchilla glass,’ a type of opaque glass with a linear texture used in the industry to build showers and residential windows. However, the original meaning of the word chinchilla, that rodent-type animal whose fur is utilized to process luxury fur coats, may be a sort of key to understanding Nishri's work, driven by a mode of action concerned with reviving, and in some cases, personifying inanimate materials and elements.

Nishri creates structures, sculptures, and two-dimensional works that seem like an abstraction of the human body, which they turn into a kind of automaton; the sculptural elements could be referred to in terms of a human organ, and therefore the artistic action could be referred to in terms of nurturing, restoring and caring, and defined as the outcome of a symbolic gesture of conjuring, of evocation.

The title of the exhibition is related to one of its main works: a hexagonal structure, each of whose faces is a panel of chinchilla glass on which wallpaper stickers in different shades of brown are pasted (with the exception of one purple wallpaper sticker). On the top part of each panel is printed a portrait of Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tanenbaum from Wes Anderson's 2001 film The Tanenbaum Family. The result brings to mind a peculiar version of an altar in the shape of a geometric corset pointing to the void and absence at its center, implying the absent image and body of Margot Tanenbaum, who, as a child, gained recognition as a playwright but at the time depicted in the film is past her peak, whose loss she seems to lament. In the context of a solo exhibition of a young artist like Nishri, Margot's story provides a model for self-confronting artistic conduct in its beginnings.

Another work in the exhibition is a pruned tree branch with forks branching out, which the artist collected from the street. After collecting, she began to bandage the branch and fill with plaster the gaps, the negative space, between the splits. The act of dressing and bandaging gives the branch characteristics of a body by ways of negation. Nishri revives the branch as a severed, wounded limb, cut off from its original context. The compaction and dressing of the space between the forks of the branch charges it with movement. It becomes a flapping wing in the midst of aviating, a materialized configuration of a blown wind, a ghostly entity visible to the eye while crossing through space.

The bandaged branch can be tied to the black umbrella sculpture with black fringes sewn to its ends and spilling out of it into the exhibition space, as if the threads were raindrops in a state extension. The resulting image is of an umbrella that produces what it is supposed to protect against, of a mechanism that activates itself and becomes a picture taken from a dream. It seems that Nishri's umbrella, and indeed an umbrella is one of the favorite objects of Dada and Surrealist artists, is like a scenario that converts the raindrops into threads that spill out of it.

Constituting an additional part of the exhibition, Nishri's two-dimensional works on plastic table cover can be charcterized as a hybrid between relief, x-ray photogram, and painting/drawing. The photogram-like aspect of the works is a product of direct friction of an object on a receptive surface. One of the works’ central motifs appearing already in early works by Nishri is a branch with a frond of a palm tree, reminiscent of her black umbrella. Nishri glued the branch to a transparency and placed it on top of the plastic surface, and then began to rub and wipe it with a acetone-soaked rag soaked. At the end of the process, the negative form of the palm branch was greened to the plastic surface. To use metaphorical language, Nishri's actions in these works can recall Aladdin's lamp whose rubbing releases the genie ghost. The mode of operation organizes the plastic table map works relates to the marking of the surface not as that which is applied from the outside but as a discovery of what exists within the substrate and as an an emergence therefrom. The surface in this case is treated as a container of latent light, shadow, and hidden entities, becoming a revelatory medium of suppressed appreances.

Ory Dessau