Rendered Void

About

March 15 – April 14, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, March 15, 6 - 8pm
DUMBO’s First Thursday Art Walk: April 4, 6 - 8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Rendered Void, an exhibition of recent photographs and porcelain sculptures by Fellowship Artist Gabriela Vainsencher. This is Vainsencher’s first institutional solo show in New York City.

On a 2018 trip to Israel, in a used book store, Vainsencher found Treasures of the Bible Lands, a catalogue for a 1987 exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. In a curious departure from the museum’s focus on modern and contemporary art, the
exhibition showed artifacts found in and around what we now call Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and the Gaza Strip. The catalogue featured striking photographic documentation of the artifacts of the myriad civilizations that lived in the Middle East in ancient times. Since acquiring the catalogue, Vainsencher has been physically and conceptually mining it to produce her latest body of work: one-to-one photographs of the book’s pages, cut up and layered. By making holes in the photos, she physically edited out the objects, leaving only negative spaces and the shadows that they had cast on their lurid backgrounds. These ravaged pages became fuel for images that call to mind the holes in the ground after an archeological expedition has departed; the negative space left behind by something that has been taken away.

Vainsencher also renders the void in a recent series of abstract porcelain sculptures, installed on a site-specific blackened steel armature that wraps around the gallery. Echoing the negative spaces in the photographs, these monochromatic sculptures
reference the body and its persistence through breakage.

Gabriela Vainsencher was born in Buenos Aires, raised in Tel Aviv, and currently lives in Brooklyn. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2016. Past solo and two-person exhibitions include CRUSH Curatorial, New York, NY; Hanina Gallery, Tel Aviv,
Israel; Musée d’Art Moderne André Malraux, Le Havre, France; Parker’s Box Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; NurtureArt, Brooklyn, NY; and La Chambre Blanche, Québec City, Canada. Her work has been included in group exhibitions including Bergamo Modern and Contemporary Art, Italy; Kunstforening, Tromsø, Norway; Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, NY; The Freies Museum, Berlin; and The National Gallery of Saskatchewan, Canada. Residencies include Yaddo, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, Byrdcliffe Artist Residency (USA), Triangle Arts Association (France), and La Chambre Blanche (Canada). In Fall 2019, Vainsencher will participate in the Bronx Museum’s AIM Residency Program. Vainsencher is the founder of the Morning Drawing Residency, and writes about art for Hyperallergic, Title Magazine, and Tohu Magazine. She also teaches art at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, and at the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, NY.

For more on the artist, visit gabrielavainsencher.com.

A.I.R. Gallery is wheelchair accessible via ramp. There are accessible toilets in the venue. There is comfortable seating with backs. Free tap water is available. The venue is nearest to the F train at York St (0.2 miles) and the A train at High St (0.5 miles). The nearest wheelchair accessible trains is the B, Q, R at Dekalb Av (1.1 miles) and the 2, 3 at Borough Hall (0.8 miles). The roads immediately surrounding the gallery are cobblestone. The nearest accessible parking garage (for an hourly fee) is
two blocks away at 100 Jay St. No ID necessary for entry. Please contact info@airgallery.org for more information.