REGARDLESS OF THE WEATHER
Second installation for Contemporary Jewish Museum, 2023 (first set of images, courtesy of CJM)
Intricate and delicate, the hand-woven foil tapestries in Regardless of the Weather make visible the immense amount of time the artist spent in the process of weaving and sculpting the paper-thin metal. Levine interlaces hand-cut foil strips into a tapestry, which is then molded around an object, recording its shape and leaving a ghostly cast of the original. Another work in Regardless of the Weather, titled Self-Portrait as Bone Breathing Machine, acts as a proxy for the artist. Located outside the entrance to the gallery, the work features a wooden chain carved from a solid piece of construction lumber matching the artist’s height. A chain can elongate when it is pulled taut or shorten when it is piled. This allows the length of the sculpture to vary from that of the original lumber. The objects in Regardless of the Weather are sculpted, by hand or chisel, to evoke the shape of now-absent forms, giving both a sense of place and grace to human ephemerality. - excerpt from Contemporary Jewish Museum wall text
First installed and documented as body of work from SUPERCOLLIDER Mothership @ Beacon Arts Building, summer 2022 (above images)
woven foil and carved wood works
2022
(text excerpted from press release 2022)
The installation explores Levine’s perpetual interest in objects - our bodily relationships to them, the stories they tell, the trails they leave behind, and their (and our) absences.
Regardless of the Weather is a turn inwards, examining the handmade, intimate, and symbolic. The solitary and tedious labor involved in this work, comes as a response to years of working predominantly in collaborative, interactive, and political projects like DIG, A Hole to Put Your Grief In (2021), and This is Not A Gun (2016-present), as well as an antidote to the past two years ruled evermore by digital interfaces. Through weaving metal and carving wood, Levine devises works of movement, ephemerality, and mystery.
The first, and smallest of the woven pieces, House (2021), appears to have emerged from a roiling sea and could devolve just as quickly - coming together and undone all at once. The weavings engage with the structural properties of the thin sheet metal material, aluminum foil. The ability for it to hold and maintain the structure of an emptiness, or hollow form, ties back to Levine’s interest in absence and the record-keeping of “object history.” Furthermore, the meaning of the word foil (to prevent from attaining an end; to thwart; and to enhance by contrast, among other meanings, represents a simple yet complex material and linguistic pun.
Foil can make a record, like a 3D rubbing of a moment in time, as delicate as it is fleeting. It can also make a tapestry, or a basket, an age-old technology for linking loose strands into fabric and form - connecting all parts. The silver surfaces reflect and refract like a warped mirror and evoke shimmering digital pixels. Levine proposes that we are made of and by all of these parts. In The Chain of Being, a poem by Jewish mystic, Moses de León, he writes, “the entire chain is one,” this is as true for a chain, as for a weaving, as for a collection of computer generated dots on a screen.
Regardless of The Weather, the trash must go out. Regardless of the Weather, there is joy and there is suffering. Regardless of the Weather, we keep at it.