Premonitory Terrains

About

Premonitory Terrains at Equity Gallery features the artwork of three New York City based artists Noriko Ambe, Nancy Baker, and Etty Yaniv. Each abstracted landscape crystallizes urgent cultural and political cues into site-responsive three dimensional installations. Primarily utilizing paper fragments, the featured works build richly layered and highly detailed environments based on tensions between pre-existing and imaginary patterns, analogous to the visual dichotomy between found and newly created materials. Altogether, their wall-reliefs, papercrafts, paintings, and free-standing sculptural installations form cohesive and highly tactile environments, prompting visitors to reflect on our daily angst from different vistas – simultaneously fantastical and very real. 

Noriko Ambe employs a conceptual system in her richly layered paper-cutouts to reflect on cycles in nature and history, drawing on forces that are both frightening and beautiful, orderly and chaotic. She cuts and stacks thousands of pieces of paper from books to create her own topography, aiming to embody the synchronicity between humans, time and nature. Ambe maps out the space between physical and emotional geography.  Subtle natural distortions arise in work invoke the nuances of human emotions, habits, and biorhythms. 

Nancy Baker’s meticulous paper cut-out installations and paintings are also impacted by a coexistence of fear and hope, but her impetus derives more overtly from her sensibility to socio-political patterns. Born in Coney Island, Baker draws her carnivalesque world from the bold colors, illusions, and fantasies from the seaside amusement park of her childhood. Baker’s complex wall reliefs are made with assorted paper fragments; hand and laser cut, printed and painted. She invites the viewer to enter a disoriented world akin to a house of mirrors, but creates a place salvaged by overriding order and method. Overt fantasy and hyperbole transform into a composite for fear and anxiety. Baker’s work is inspired by darker human struggles, it also reflects a desire to rise above them and strive for a world with a potential for beauty and growth. 

In her immersive installations Etty Yaniv also juggles with dichotomies of the chaotic and the orderly, drawing on patterns from nature and images from daily life to form hybrid landscapes which blur the line between the real and the imagined, the organic and the artificial. The multiple layers of repurposed materials, both found and recycled from her previous work, reflect a preoccupation with ephemerality alluding to survival in the context of social and ecological transience. Like encoded messages excavated from an archeological site, the fragments in each of her layers present new clues that accumulate into the documentation of a moment in time. Only up-close-viewers may discover the hidden content underneath. 

The creation of art is often an attempt for artists to construct a zone of stability and safety that does not exist in a chaotic world. Through their artwork, these three artists filter the trauma and distress of unpredictability and upheaval and ascribe an ordered structure to an authentic experience. The works Premonitory Terrains is affected by the emotional reverberations of our contemporary culture, yet the artists seek to counterbalance a pervading sense of fear with some sort of intelligible order.