Lee Nevo
In CC Tobačna 001 residential artist Lee Nevo is presenting a solo exhibition The unofficial office for the removal of rebellious moral issues. With his famous sentence, “Medium is the message”, the theoretician Marshall McLuhan placed the means at the focus of our culture and forced us to first look at the medium used by the Israeli artist Lee Nevo (1984, Jerusalem). Based on banding together diverse objects, Nevo’s work is formally a continuation of the line of individual artistic practices, which goes back to Duchamp and Picasso and may be recognised under the common label Found Objects.
The artist thoroughly processes the objects, combines them with industrial articles and presents them in the form of artefacts, videos and drawings. Structures with a strong optical and symbolic message are developed in the direction of juxtaposing materials of ambivalent characteristics, e.g. soft–hard, sharp–dull, organic–inorganic, etc., while simultaneously applying also their original nuances of meaning. The scenes of her settings are conceived as psychological and physical spaces reminiscent of offices or waiting rooms. The authoress does not produce beautiful creations that would satisfy the viewer with their aesthetic dimension. Quite to the contrary, her rooms, some kind of Cabinets of Curiosities, are primarily used to evoke conditions that often refer to very subjective experiences or conceptions and, despite humorous additions, bear a sinister connotation.
Nevo’s project The unofficial office for the removal of rebellious moral issues, opens up issues of human nature and its relationship to the (repressive) authority. These two parameters, as constituent elements of work's ethical status, shift the installation in the realm of human inner experience. The structure is a depiction of mental space, a kind of model of the mind, while the capability of movement within the imaginary fields establishes a question of the viewer's role.
Lee Nevo creates her works for the sticky matter of the human subconscious, by using ordinary, trivial objects that through processing take on new and unexpected aspects. Her world is the world of The Uncanny, where every recognisable object is transformed, transposed and exaggerated to the point where they start to resonate with our feeling of discomfort. By doing so, she opens the nature of the artist’s work to the field of existential consideration; in her “rooms” intended for both estranged contemporary subject and the isolation of the individual, it is easy to contemplate the pain of existence.
Colophon
Production: Museum and Galleries of LjubljanaExhibition curator: Alenka TrebušakArtist: Lee NevoText: Alenka TrebušakDesign: Ajdin BašićRealisation of the exhibition: Technical Service MGMLThe exhibition was made possible by: City of Ljubljana, Department for Culture
Location
Tobačna ulica 1
1000 Ljubljana
Information and reservations:
T +386 1 24 12 500
T +386 1 24 12 506
E prijava@mgml.si
Opening hours
Exhibition space is open according to exhibitions:
Tuesday–Friday: 11:00–19:00
Monday, Saturday, Sunday: Closed
Tickets
Free entry.
News
The work of Lee Nevo consists of habitual estrangement of found objects that are treated with care and merged into sculptures, videos, drawings and installations. Her curiously intelligent vantage point materializes into an emblematic yet amusing works that vary between playfulness and tortures. The artist has been chosen by our artist-in-residence exchange partner The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon.