May 3 – August 1, 2015
In this two-person multimedia exhibition, two identical dark rooms
project each artist’s moving images and mechanical sounds.
Mana Contemporary is pleased to announce a duo show with Ofri Cnaani and Nelly Agassi titled Crippled Symmetry. In the two-persons exhibition, two identical dark rooms immerse viewers with a pulsating audiovisual experience of moving images and mechanical sounds.
Nelly Agassi’s animated drawings use abstracted geometric shapes to re-imagine mental institutions designed by Thomas Scott Kirkbride. Using Kirkbride’s blueprints as inspiration, Agassi produces her own ambiguous floor plans, employing a visual language of lines and curves referencing space and control. In this new series of short animations, Agassi’s drawings become a sort of architectural Rorschach test alternately resembling masks, faces, and even the female reproductive system.
In the center of Ofri Cnaani’s new installation is a room-size mirror tray filled with water, lying on a massive table, resembling the developing tray in a dark room. Slowly moving on the water’s surface are dozens of archival images from a kibbutz where the artist was born and raised. Overhead, projector’s arms are capturing, then projecting all over the room, the floating historical vignettes that keep traveling in the tray, with no predictable path, creating what the artist calls “accidental narratives.”
Inspired by Morton Feldman’s “Crippled Symmetry” music piece, the two artists work simultaneously, leaving visitors no indication of how and where they should synchronize or be read apart. The two rooms, drawing black-and-white personal notes from rigorous, yet defunct, living models, function like two machine rooms, or rather, a room of many wonders.
