BASEMENT GALLERY OAKLAND

Curated by Anja Ulfeldt

Basement Gallery Oakland is thrilled to announce Pffrrrfrrfrfrfrplplppp, an exhibition of new interactive sculpture by Einat Imber. On view June 17th through July 1st.

 

Einat Imber’s artistic practice is one that is both marked by and concerned with boundaries, delineations and mobility. An immigrant with bittersweet relationships to the landscape she left behind and the one she now roams on american soil, Imber explores human agency within geographical, political and time based contexts. Currently in residence at Lucid Arts Foundation in Point Reyes, CA, Einat has lifted her roots, relinquished any home base and set out on a mobile journey with art. 

 

Over the past two years Imber has created cyanotypes on burlap by placing a huge sheet of the sensitized cloth in the path of a rising tide and allowing the sun and water from two distant oceans to complete the series of compositions made in both the atlantic and pacific oceans. Concurrently she constructed an oversized burlap “boat” and made it solid by drenching it in resin. Shortly after her exhibition with B.G.O. she will set out to connect the atlantic to the pacific once again, this time using this large scale folded fabric boat. Sea to Sea is the journey of this sculptural boat, by land, from sea to sea. 

For her solo exhibition at Basement Gallery Oakland she will present a piece of absurdist wooden machinery from which visitors may launch mechanically inflated balloons, watching and listening as they briefly fly, propelled by wind that also produces a flapping sound upon the balloon's resigned exhail. These momentary celestial bodies measure time with their own short lifespans before they rest finally on the floor with those that came before them.

 

Describing her new work, Einat wrote "The gallery space is like a living body into which the audience enters. Blue and red pipes, like veins and arteries, blow a constant flow of air: pffffffffffffffff… Along the pipes, mechanical arms slowly pump up and down, swinging by the hum of an electrical motor: dddjjjjjjjjjjjjj… Every once in a while the beast is awakened, an air compressor in absentia chugs air into pressure: trrtrrrtrrrrtrr…. Under the audience feet the ground is squishy, a thick colorful layer of deflated latex balloons.

 

In this breathing apparatus the viewer plays a role - pick up a balloon and fit it over an open tip of a pipe. Air rushes in and the latex skin expands, in a slow and constant gesture the balloon inflates. Inhale: pfwaaaaahhh… If it keeps on like that, it would take in air until it bursts. But on its own cyclical rhythm, as if serving another bodily function, the motor’s arm approaches the balloon and releases it off the tip of the pipe. Exhale: pflrrpflllrrrrpfrpfr….