Etty Yaniv lives in the NYC area and works in her studio in Brooklyn. She got her BA in English Literature and Psychology at Tel Aviv University, BFA at Parsons, and MFA at SUNY Purchase. She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows at galleries and museums, including The Haifa Museum of Art, Israel, State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia, Newark Museum of Art, NJ, Monmouth Museum of Art, NJ, Torrance Art Museum, CA, AIR gallery, Brooklyn, Purdue University, IN, Musée Héritage, St. Albert, CA, Zero1 Biennial in San Francisco, and Leipziger Baumwollspinnerie, Leipzig Germany. She runs Art Spiel, an online art publication. In 2018 she was awarded the Two Trees subsidized studio space in Dumbo where she currently works. Instagram https://www.instagram.com/etty.yaniv

QUESTION:

Your installation work is made of intricate layers of recycled and found materials.  From a distance they often resemble abstracted landscapes, but when viewed closeup they reveal multiple fragmented narratives. The shifting of perspective, and the possibilities inherent in simultaneous narratives are complex and fascinating.   Could you tell me more about this?

ANSWER:

When I was a young child, I would sometimes wake up at night with a flashing sensation of seeing the world from outside my body. These episodes were probably brief, but they felt timeless, like an encapsulated time when the moment is sharply here as a continuum of past and future. This urgent need to grasp simultaneous perspectives that are constantly shifting and converging, has germinated in my mind and I have been trying to embody these dichotomies in my artwork — visceral and ethereal, stirring and peaceful, fragmented and continuous, inward and external, and I can go on. This draw to fluid complexity is in my DNA but it is most likely also rooted in a life experience that then has deepened this innate sense of reality—being a daughter of refugee parents, myself an immigrant.

1509.9 Nautical Miles from the Karl Heiene Kanal, 9.5’x 4’ x 8”, 2012, mixed media on paper

To my mind, autobiographical narratives have always been entangled in History in its widest sense, social and natural histories alike. That perception inherently involves simultaneous narratives in flux which can become an overwhelming psychological entanglement and its complexity has been driving me to keep questioning in my art (and life) — how the autobiographical “I“ interconnects with the “we” ,“them” and “it”. Thematically speaking, since my early art formative years I have been fascinated by the convergence of human, technology, and what we call “nature” — with interchanging elements and focus throughout the years but always with proclivity to imagine or re-imagine spaces through playing with two and three dimensional forms, coalescing traces from my everyday life into hybrid landscapes of sorts while making the fragmentary essence visible.

1509.9 nautical miles from the Karl Heine Kanal( detail)

Perhaps by constructing and deconstructing these familiar materials into forms that evade a clear definition of dimensionality, I have been trying to embody my sense of existential fluidity and fragmented reality. The acts of collecting, layering, and editing signify diaristic documentation as a performative or even a ritual form, an enactment of a desire for meaning in everyday life, and survival as a human race. At the end of the day I see my work as a visual open-ended storytelling of co-existing fractured paradoxes and intra-acting contradictions. Hiding and revealing, digging into prolonged searches and gaining immediate satisfaction, are probably among the most delicate and mysterious elements in my thinking in material process and in looking at art overall.

Please take a look at this video of Etty’s 2019 installation project entitled- TRANSIENT PRESSENCE-

Transient Presence, 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R74h-_Bc78

60’ scroll, modular installation, 2019, mixed media on paper, video by Dada Shikako