Appendices

Appendices is a site-specific installation made of assorted repurposed material that create through a visceral experience a visible understanding of the urgency we are facing in climate change. The title Appendices is defined as supplementary material attached usually at the end of a piece of writing, such as a book’s bibliography or glossary of terms. In response to the educational function of the building, the installation starts at the entrance with a highly detailed horizontal sculpture depicting weathered piles of “open books” that are balancing each other on top of two elongated tables. Made of reused material and recycled paintings from Yaniv’s previous installations, the “books” depict fragmented visual stories which raise questions such as: How do we process knowledge? What are the ways we formulate narratives about our reality? 

The installation flows to the back space, where a large-scale sculptural mobile suspends in mid-air against the large front window, making it also visible from outside the building. Its organic curvy shapes and blue-green-gray colors peppered with earth tones are associated with natural patterns such as water currents and plant growth, invoking a link between the luscious garden with its pastoral brook outdoors and the urban architecture of the space indoors. Visitors are lured in from the outside, prompted to get close to the work and reflect within this experiential environment on a changing climate, what is at stake, and what is their position on it.

Etty Yaniv Artist Statement

In my painting, sculptural paintings, and installations I draw on patterns from nature and images from daily life, altogether forming hybrid environments that blur the line between the real and the imagined, the organic and the artificial, the chaotic and the orderly. My sculptural installations are typically site responsive and engage with the space in visceral ways. They are made of highly textured clusters of painted repurposed materials taken from my art studio and my everyday life, mainly assorted paper and plastic. These disjointed material fragments coalesce into sculptures of varied scales that are all light weight and ephemeral yet by grouping them in dense clusters of painted textured layers, they appear massive or even monumental.

From afar they seem like tactile segments of satellite images or abstracted seascapes, but from closeup they reveal tiny narratives documenting vignettes from my daily experiences. The clustered dimensional structures, and often not less important, the breathing spaces in between, create an overall rhythmic flow in the exhibition space, activating walls, air, and floor into a visceral environment where the visitor is prompted to walk through and observe from different perspectives.