Above: Poster of 'Take Me There' in the studio, and 'Fruitful Anxiety'
I was actually scrambling my brain as I was saying it, to me it’s very old and new — I personally like the old, I love running into a 16th-century cathedral in Hell’s Kitchen and being totally thrown off. In the rest of the US you just don’t have things that are that old. And then you have Hudson Yards which is so sparkling new — I think of it as the two clashing.
For me it raises questions of, when you look at architecture, who is it serving? If you have a new building with high technology and anything you can imagine, but I can’t access that building, then it’s kind of a problem for me. I think it should serve us. Whether I can go into a church and experience its architectural achievement is a question I’m interested in. Here, I’m lucky, I’m on the 15th floor — I would never get to experience this kind of place, only thanks to LMCC.
There’s a certain architecture to FiDi. I really like it down here because it’s so vertical, and I like the sound of it, there’s always this kind of ambient sound. Do you feel like having this space has informed your work?
Yeah, and also Hunter College is near here, it’s by Chinatown and Tribeca.
Wait, isn’t Hunter College on 68th street?
It’s on 68th, but the MFA is on Hudson and Canal. They keep the artists far away.
Artists belong downtown. So you feel like that’s informed you?
It’s definitely been a part of it, and there were always like double security checks and regulations, you always had to be double checked and there were magnetic doors to get into the school, and for me, for someone who just moved from Israel, it was shocking to see something like that — in Israel, art school is an open space, you do whatever you want. Sometimes my teacher would smoke in the corridor, I don’t think it’s a good example.
You’d be crucified in New York!
There was something about being in art school related to freedom of moving in a space, and here you always have to identify and move these heavy doors, and you always interact with the security guard and it’s kind of limiting. I feel it damages creativity, or maybe it does the opposite.
And looking at your work, some of them almost do look like cages, like they’re confining the space inside of them. It’s like MC Escher goes to prison in a subway.
Can I show you something — this was a proposal for a sculpture. It’s old, it’s from 2015. The title is ‘Gateway.’
Can you walk into it?
Yeah, it’s a proposal for a sculpture based on border architecture, where you have to cross from one state to another, it’s specifically from the one between Palestine and Israel, that’s the one I was inspired by.
Is there something like this?
Yes, it’s much shorter, but here I extended it. I see it as a crossing device, it’s a space that’s in between things, literally.
Where do you imagine this being erected? As a public art thing?
Yeah. Because it’s so large, I decided to do it in small steps, in a modular way, so I did already the first one, it’s smaller. I’m going to propose this to Creative Time, they have an open call for public art, I want to make it here also. But here is the shortest version, you can actually go through this, then I made the second one at Smack Mellon in DUMBO. Then I added one more section. It’s an ongoing project, so every time I show it, I’ll extend it. But it’s also another good example of architecture and identity. For example, in border crossing it’s very de-humanizing, it takes away your identity, it takes away your human value in a way, people always say they feel like animals.
It’s also like what you were saying about it being global — I don’t look at it and immediately think of Israel. There must be gates like that everywhere.
Especially talking about the Mexican-American border. It’s something to talk about and think about — how do you do a border? What’s the purpose? It’s not just to lock and forget. Then I have a solo show coming up at mhPROJECT in the East Village, it’s a small space.