Mazmanian Gallery: Nava Lubelski’s
“Reverse Engineering"

By Ashley Moran
Staff Writer

With so much destruction going on in the world today, Nava Lubelski’s exhibit, “Reverse Engineering,” on display in the Mazmanian Art Gallery, sends a positive message: You can mend something you once had the impulse to destroy and make a once decrepit, discarded object beautiful.

At first, I was skeptical of the artist’s pieces with names such as “Gooey” and “Unruly,” but after walking around the exhibit and examining the thirteen pieces, I gained a respect for the intricately stitched canvases.

When I first walked into the exhibit, my eyes were immediately drawn to the oversized yellow piece hanging on the back wall. This piece, called “The New Order,” is an experiment, according to Lubelski. Rather than using a traditional medium, the artist transformed a discarded, stained blanket into her canvas. There is one other oversized piece called “All Better,” which is also constructed on a discarded piece of fabric. The rest of the pieces in the exhibit consist of eight twelve-inch-by twelve-inch canvases and three slightly bigger canvases.

The artist contrasts herself to Jackson Pollock by admiring the angst and aggression he puts into his work, but at the same time, Lubelski adds an element she refers to as “feminine,” which is the element of repair. She intricately stitches the borders of tears in her canvases to mend them, creating something new, interesting and strangely harmonic.

The Wesleyan University graduate, who started out as a painter, found some pieces of fabric in a dumpster in New York ten years ago, which inspired her to change the course of her work. On her earlier pieces, Lubelski used instruments of everyday life such as coffee, ink and wine to stain her canvases. In her own words, “the nature of our lives stains things.” On her more recent canvases, Lubelski uses a very thinned-out acrylic paint to stain the canvas, which gives more breadth and room to experiment with color.

FSC student Deb Rosenberg appreciated the natural aspect of Lubelski’s exhibition, saying, “I really liked ‘Gooey.’ [Lubelski] used a textile, lacy stitch, but incorporated a biological aspect. To me, the stitch work resembled a 3-D membrane.”

Art enthusiast or not, this exhibit is definitely worth checking out. The eye-opening exhibit is on display in the Mazmanian Art Gallery until Dec. 18, 2009.