Toony Navok in her studio
Toony Navok’s “Origins”, her critically acclaimed debut solo show at Noga Gallery in Tel Aviv, re-arranged the space with a landscape of brightly coloured installations, alongside drawings and collaged prints. Her sculptural works were made of household products, DIY parts from hardware stores, as well as custom-made pipes or shelving systems and the occasional found object, all assembled to create curious constructions verging on the mystical. Cleaning products and shiny lacquered panels lent the works a distinctively manufactured glossy veneer – and an equally distinctive smell. Navok’s probing of the characteristics of the industrially manufactured product, its potential as pure object, and rebirth in a conceptual artwork seeking to give shape to the sublime, resembles an alchemical process with strong links to Twentieth Century art history.
Sleek met up with Navok at her studio in Tel Aviv shortly after she had dismantled the show – a stage she regards as the final performative aspect of the sculptural work – to talk about her view of objects and soft spot for…sponges.
You work in various mediums; do you have a preference for working in either two and three-dimensions?
I’m a sculptor, but I did go through phases with other mediums. Drawing is also a part of my work but I see it as a form of sculpting. What excites me the most is to move things around, deal with the body, and the relation of objects in the space to the body. I’m interested in the closeness of representation to life and to everyday reality. You see my artistic “roots” in this interest, as I started with design and performance originally.
Performance is still an element of your work, though, isn’t it?
Yes, it still happens in the studio, with myself, but also while installing each piece in the show: it’s a very constitutive moment, where things suddenly come together. My sculptural work is not classically done, where a sculpture is built in the studio and then sent off to a gallery as a finalised object. My action within it is very important.
Yet the performance takes place without an audience or any documentation.
Yes, though when I dismantled the show this time I filmed myself taking a wall-piece down. Watching it, I became aware of the importance of taking a work apart and how it relates to the show itself. As a sculptor I can’t resist the need to touch and surround myself with tangible things. In the past I did some performances where I was physically present. I think I was making a statement, because I moved from graphic design to art making, and needed to make myself literally visible, as if saying, “I’m here”. I did a lot of performances with objects and slowly but surely the objects entered my studio, until at some point I didn’t need the performative presence any more.
Toony Navok in her studio
Tell me about the objects you collect. What exactly are you looking for in objects?
Oftentimes it’s about form, I see a form and I detach it from its function. Sometimes it’s guided by an emotional reaction to an object – I even identify with certain things.
Do you mean a nostalgic sentiment an object can invoke or what kind of identification exactly?
Also nostalgic, but mostly it’s just the forms, I actually identify with certain forms. I collect these objects that reflect on me, and then the performance happens in the studio, when objects suddenly come together, when hierarchies are established between them. It happens very suddenly. And when I install a show I re-enact this moment. I always leave an element of uncertainty for the installation at the gallery though, so that things would just take their turn. Looking back at it I think it’s a little crazy. What if it didn’t happen? How would I have put together a show? But it did.
Your debut solo show at Noga Gallery was titled “Mekorot”, which is Hebrew for Origins, but also Sources or Springs. What does the title refer to?
Mekorot is a versatile word, but in the show it’s above all meant as Origins, and it refers to a return to pure form, to an abstract view of things as shapes. Why is an object made with a specific form? Why are things designed a certain way? Design in general is a key interest of mine. It’s so critical and political as it actually shapes our everyday reality and I’m asking, how is it that we consume objects that have been designed a certain way almost automatically. It’s sometimes a historically established factor, like a certain colour being associated with hygiene for example.
Your own origins, coming from design are also visible in the work.
It’s a fascination I have. My works also oscillate between all-or-nothing: between substance and collapse. They’re modular, and connect momentarily into a sculpture when assembled. The political in my work also relates to design and architecture: it is through design that we project what we want to be, our aspirations and desires, both individually and socially. So the individual decisions and visual choices that we make in our everyday, that’s the political question I’m raising.
In addition, Origins in regards to shapes also relates to a return to reduction that corresponded with certain moments and movements in art history. By the way, these are not things I think about when making my pieces. I generally don’t think so much when I produce work. All these readings come later, and oftentimes from other people. There was a group of Zen design aficionados at the show who heard about it and came to see it. They gave the show a Zen interpretation. That pleased me, of course, because I see the sculptures as poems, as Haikus that summarise and extract, and they recognised that in my sculptures!
Toony Navok, Origins (2013), Installation view, Noga gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Photo by Elad Sarig
And then there’s the reference to water – is that a further level of the show?
Exactly. Mekorot is the name of the Israeli water company, so this only conjures up a certain reference to Israelis, but the show is based on the colour blue; like water, like surfaces with certain functions, and also there’s this entangled piping and plumbing that doesn’t connect to anything, it’s just spiralling around itself. Water is a leitmotif in the show – and the discussion of the body in relation to water.
How did you plan this plumbing actually?
I often rely on craftsmen and manufacturers to produce custom-made objects for me. I order things that I’m not sure are possible to make and, again, leave some room for chance. I approach it just like any other client ordering shelves or whatever; I don’t tell them I’m an artist at first. This is a critical moment, to understand who can take my complete lack of knowledge about the materials they specialise in, and work with it. My sculptures are so intuitive that I often don’t understand where they came from. So I need to find craftsmen who are competent and patient, whom I can trust and who won’t get annoyed at my strange requests.
Would you say your sculptures have become more polished through working with craftsmen? It’s different than using found objects only.
I like showing a facade that’s heroic, larger than life, and such facades are usually flattened, it’s showy. Nearly perfect. Architecture tries to achieve that too. It’s true that before, my work was more about creating the models for something. Small mentions as references to something else. Now, if I want to represent a parasol for example, I actually use a parasol. It excites me to use the real object that make up the world and that interact with our reality.
You mentioned you identify with certain forms earlier – could you name an object whose form you identify with?
(Laughing) I think it’s the sponges, mostly! They seduce me as objects. It’s very funny to me that they exist, designed by someone, and are sold, and that people buy them, in all seriousness. There’s something so childish about them, but adults buy them. Play is an important word for me.
Speaking of play, what’s the fluid in the Temple sculpture?
Softener. It has a very distinctive smell, associated with cleanliness but actually quite chemical. The smell hits you before you see the sculpture. The colour of the softener also relates to the reductionism in the colour palette that recurs in the show, featuring light pink, milky yellow and baby blue – colours associated with hygiene and given to certain cleaning products. They’re also very flat. The strangest thing was people’s reactions to the containers of cleaning products. All I did was remove the labels, but people thought I manipulated the colours or shapes. These are objects we deal with everyday, and that everyone has at home. All I did was abstract their function.