Michal Gavish – Crystalline City at LIU

Michal Gavish, NYC3, photo courtesy of the artist

Crystalline City is an exhibition of large-scale installations by Michal Gavish, on view now at the Humanities Gallery at LIU, Brooklyn. Presented in this unique glass walled gallery akin to a large scale oval diorama, the viewer can see the works from the outside. Designed on a combination of translucent fabrics and papers, the hand made prints transmit and reflect the surrounding lights and allow for multiple full views of the installation, through and around these fabrics.

Michal Gavish, DC3, photo courtesy of the artist

To a chemist, urban structures are familiar: they look naturally constructed, growing like crystals in a laboratory. Michal Gavish, who studied and worked with crystals as a scientist, now integrates these structures into images of cityscapes. Using a special printing method that she had devised as a chemist, she deconstructs her new hometown of Washington, DC, alongside depictions of New York neighborhoods – drawing upon her personal experience of living in both cities.

Michal Gavish, DC1, photo courtesy of the artist

Gavish rearranges her own photography-based images of city buildings into geometries that extend vertically. She recasts familiar city streets into invented layouts, resonating with undercurrents of turmoil in the magnificent and still buildings. Her careful compositions of multiple lines, squares and rectangles display natural patterns of crystalline-like geometries, resembling scaffoldings of infinitely long rows of windows and columns.

Her juxtapositions are layered. For example, she turns the majestic Washington government buildings into house of card arrangements , while piling sequence of NYC neighborhoods to record her own migration story. Printed on translucent fabric layers, the vacant structures become intimate memories of contemporary archaeological sites. These images emerge like thin embroidery patterns that sometimes appear flat and at other moments seem three-dimensional.

Michal Gavish, NYC2, photo courtesy of the artist
Michal Gavish, installation view, LIU, photo courtesy of the artist

Michal Gavish is an installation artist currently living and working in Washington, DC. Her work is influenced by her previous career as a PhD research scientist. She exhibits internationally, including a solo museum show in Budapest. Gavish writes reviews and lectures extensively on Art and Science. She has co-curated group shows in the NYC area and was awarded several artist residencies in NYC and Europe.

MICHAL GAVISH / CRYSTALLINE CITY at  The Humanities Gallery at LIU, Brooklyn  (intersection of DeKalb and Flatbush Avenues, downtown Brooklyn )

Opening:  April 17th 6-8:00 PM.

The show runs  through May 25th