Yizhak Elyashiv: New Prints

Brenda Star: Manifold

June 5 — July 10 at Gallery NAGA

Capping its 32nd exhibition season, Gallery NAGA presents solo exhibitions by Yizhak Elyashiv and Brenda Star. 

Elyashiv is a native of Israel who has lived and worked in Providence, Rhode Island since 1991.  His best-known prints, which have been shown and collected by museums throughout the country, are records of physical activity in and out of the studio, “maps” of gestures and measurements undertaken in the landscape and on his printing plates. 

Star has been recognized as a significant Boston-based sculptor since the early 1980s.  Her work’s recognizable elements (hat or shoe forms, body parts) draw the viewer into terrain that shifts unexpectedly away from what’s suggested at first glance.  Her sculpture revels in contradicting first impressions.

We asked Elyashiv and Star a few questions about their current work.

Gallery NAGA:  For many years your work has focused on large-scale, abstract “maps.”  In this show you’ve moved into figurative territory also.  Is this a first for you?

Yizhak Elyashiv:  No, it’s not a first time. I think that all through the work that explored the map, gesture, landscape, I was still connected to observation or looking.  There were earlier series in which I explored this branch but never exhibited.  It was put aside a little bit with the interest in the maps.  This exhibition grew from one image that I stumbled upon in the studio, and it became what started this investigation.

Q:  What led you to develop these variations on the work of Martin Schongauer?

A:  I first saw the image of the Foolish Virgin and loved it.  It is one of the most beautiful portraits of that period.  I wanted to own it, and so I remade it.  I also wanted to get into understanding how it was made by re-cutting it like a student copying a master, to feel the gesture of the line carvings.  Then by reading more about the images that Schongauer worked on, I understood that by reprinting it I would change the status of the Virgin.  The orientation and the idea of the conservation of the oil then became very important parts in the rest of the work.

Q:  In the original version the wise virgin conserves her oil, and the foolish virgin spills her oil.

A:  The conservation of oil is an allegory for faith.  By printing the Virgin with oil, she still owns it, it’s on her dress, body, her oil is still preserved.

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Gallery NAGA:  You’ve been incorporating animal body parts in your work for several years now.  Why?

Brenda Star:  They’re a way of dealing with the senses without a connection to a particular individual personality.  I use the animal parts as generics for how we receive, process, and emit information.  It’s about hearing, breathing, thinking.  They’re portals that connect the continuum of information from outside the body to what goes on inside the body.

Q:  Your earlier Continuum Series  explored the relationship from outside to inside.

A:  It’s not about the relationship of outside to inside, it’s inside to outside also.  It’s not one-way.  It’s a loop.  I’m trying to get past binary systems.  At some point outside and inside disappear.

Q:  Like a Möbius strip?

A:  I’d have to think about that.  Provisionally.  Because that’s a closed system, too.

Q:  So what would be an example of an open system?

A:  That’s what I’m trying to find out. 

Q:  Why has plaster become your material of choice?

A:  I like the color and the surface and that you can add and subtract at the same time; it’s resistant in a way that clay isn’t.

Q:  You’ve taught sculpture for years in the Tufts/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston joint program.  How does that affect your work?

A:  A lot of it has nothing to do with my work.  It’s rewarding on a personal level to have relationships with students and to guide them in art-making and thinking about the visual world.  Watching them grapple with materials and concepts is very engaging.