* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Nava Lubelski holds a BA degree in Russian Language, Literature and History from Wesleyan University, Connecticut.
Her work contrasts aggression with masochistic patience and sublimation, in an exploration of the impulse to destroy and the compulsion to mend.
She juxtaposes rapid acts of destruction with paradoxically painstaking and time-consuming labor. Lubelski aims for the embroidery, which is blatantly insufficient to masks any stain or rip beneath it, as a narrative of accident.
Tax Files is a series of shredded-paper sculptures, created by collecting masses of documents and then grouping each one, by its content, until all the information was neatly organized by color: deposit slips, pay stubs, receipts, tax forms. The result is map that is reminiscent of tree cross-sections.
The re-use of paper and the ‘repairs’ of the original tree are an expression of personal despair regarding the wasteful and unsustainable way in which we live, but it is also responding to the impulse to hoard and keep what we no longer need.
Her work has been extensively exhibited nationwide and she has received numerous awards, including most recently a 2010 Artist Fellowship Award from Arts Council in North Carolina, where she lives.
