LAMINATED EARTH
Artist: Sharon Yavo-Ayalon
Curator: Lola Ben Alon
SOLO SHOW ZAZ10TS GALLERY
Feb 10 - April 25, 2022
10 TIMES SQUARE | 1441 Broadway, New York, NY 10018
Spanning across several disciplines, Laminated Earth is a site-specific, multimedia installation that reconciles architectural representations of housing while drawing from land art practices of raw soils and synthetic matter. Created by artist and architect Sharon Yavo-Ayalon and curated by Professor Lola Ben-Alon, Laminated Earth transforms the confined lobby of 10 Times Square into a shimmering, golden dream. The exhibition extends to the ZAZ Corner billboard on 41st and 7th with video art, taken from a performance of the artist who builds, destroys, and then rebuilds her own nylon home, inhibited by madness and the promise of immigration to a better land. A challenging juxtaposition of art and advertising are accompanied by architectural symbols to create a new paragon of public art.
Photos: Changbin Kim and Yunha Choi
The exhibition, comprised of a series of site-specific installations and a video art performance, mediates between the personal and collective homes while engaging in the obsessive preservation of raw soils as an increasingly eliminated resource. Entering the exhibition, the viewer realizes that not all that glitters is gold but is rather a muddy, dirt matter on plain nylon. Laminated Earth is both the action and the outcome, the process and the object, where the viewers are invited to explore Yavo Ayalon’s multidisciplinary contemporary art practice and her unique perspective on land art, performance art, and architecture.
The art and biography of Sharon Yavo-Ayalon are directly intertwined. In her work, Yavo Ayalon makes references to her childhood landscapes at the Israeli Kibbutz while contemplating land histories and her relocated housing experience in the USA. The soils used in the exhibition were extracted by the artist from Goshen, a village in upstate NY that is named after the Biblical Goshen in Israel. At a broader level, the artist’s obsessive preservation of the raw earth is perpetuated towards a future in which humankind will be laminating all the natural earth soils on the planet, asking what it means to work with a material that has been moved and discomposed, built upon, plasticized, laminated, and slowly - eliminated.
The surreal environment created in this installation is composed of mud paintings, sculpture forms, and a videoart performance projection. At the entrance to the exhibition is the Nylon Architect video, which depicts an art performance created, directed, and performed by Yavo-Ayalon at the 2019 Acco Fringe Theater Festival in Israel. Nylon Architect tells the story of an archetypal female architect who teaches her students the foundations of building a sound family home while building and destroying her own nylon-made home. Centered around the video art, and in reference to the artist’s previous work, are three sculptural typologies: Nylon Homes, 7ft Apart Curtains, and Mud and Maritime Creatures. Nylon Homes consists of stationary nylon structures that reminisce the nylon homes from within the Nylon Architect performance. 7 ft Mud Curtains are mud-painted curtains that form a 3-dimensional terrain of transparent walls, revealing a female figure bathing in mud. Mud and Maritime Creatures display compositions made of soil as a core matter, wrapped and glazed with a plastic surface. The plastic coating serves as a conservation layer for the dried earth core but also imbue the concept of a new meaning and properties of strength.
Yavo Ayalon uses earth as a tactile matter that represents her personal home; but also as a symbol for the collective home, that is, humanity’s “planet earth”. By laminating earth, Yavo Ayalon portrays a critical statement on the lamination of planet earth and its destruction while using the soils to connect to a place – and to express her longing for what was our past home.
In collaboration:
The Natural Material Lab, Columbia University
The Future Automation Lab, Cornell Tech
Videographer: Gil Ayalon | Photos: Changbin Kim and Yunha Choi | Robotics Choreography: Rei Lee
Photos: Changbin Kim and Yunha Choi
Laminatede Earth, Sharon Yavo-Ayalon’s large-scale multimedia installation at ZAZ10TS intersects architectural representations of housing with land art practices—raw soil and synthetic matter coalesce. Sharon Yavo-Ayalon, an artist and architect, draws from both disciplines to transform the confined lobby of 10 Times Square into a shimmering dreamy landscape. The exhibition extends to the ZAZ corner billboard on 41st and 7th with video art, taken from a performance of the artist who builds, destructs, and rebuilds her own plastic home. The show is curated by Professor Lala Ben-Alon and runs in the gallery through April 28th, 2022.
Featured on ZAZ Corner’s In Between | February 10 - March 17, 2022
The exhibition also features Nylon Architect video, which depicts an art performance created, directed, and performed by Sharon Yavo-Ayalon at the 2019 Acco Fringe Theater Festival in Israel. It will be featured on ZAZ Corner’s In Between Programming. The artwork is displayed for 15 seconds at a time on a large LED billboard in the heart of Times Square.
Location: 41st Street and 7th Avenue, New York, NY
