"Designs for Living" - Tova Lotan Exhibition
Dotan Blais December 2015
What is homey about a house? A red tile roof? A tree that provides shade? Sounds of children? Perhaps exercise books from the first grade, or the children’s school supplies. Tova Lotan creates designs for living using wax paper, school exercise books, and architectural plans. She creates homes "on paper" and freezes the image at a static point. The raw materials of her work have not only changed or were once something else, but represent an intermediate stage, the stage at which a house exists in its preliminary sketches. Lotan's works, including photographs, digital processing of houses and embroidered exercise books, undergo a kind of metamorphosis in which caterpillars don't become butterflies, but rather take on new, inherently political forms. The exhibition is based on two non-parallel axes which intersect; the point of intersection results in a statement which is ideologically gender imposed in the symbolic expression of language, while containing patriarchal connotations in the symbolic order of art.
Positioned on the first axis are photographs and printed graphic adaptations of houses. The house undergoes a continuous metamorphosis in an attempt to upset, repair, hide and erase the outlines which were suggested by the early architectural sketches. The works related to the second axis are school exercise books on which the artist has sewn typical slang words used to stereotype women and, as part of the same endeavor, exercise books on which houses are embroidered, as well as their architectural plans. The elusive conceptual relationship between the home space and linguistic space is brought together through the medium of embroidery, which itself has a gender connotation.
In the history of art a woman's status was determined by her crafting skills, a kind of mutual embodiment. Knitting and sewing were considered "women's work;" the piece of work created was considered feminine and its esthetic value was relegated to the category of "folk art" at best, or "home crafts," which meant having even less value. Shifting craft or art production into the home denoted the adoption of a societal structure which was essentially patriarchal.
Lotan examines this point in time not only to elucidate the change, but also in an effort to find a place at the threshold where the social domestic structure can be deferred. She places the architectural sketches opposite the embroidery work as a reminder that the artistic medium is also gender related; she recreates an architectural sketch through sewing in order to suggest the possibility that the conception in the sketch could become "unstitched." For example, she embroiders a red house on old notebooks because in its graphic, abstract and fluid state even the connection between the physical foundations of the house - concrete and bricks - and its more profound semiotic structure can be unraveled. Lotan's threads wander from traditional home crafts to pairing these with the foundations of a house, using strong red colors.
The exhibition emphasizes the inherent connection between the two - home and embroidery, embroidery and home – and uses notebooks on which stereotypical labels of women are embroidered. Occasionally, one stereotype is embroidered over another stereotype, emphasizing the laborious and repetitive nature of the work. The embroidered stereotypes one on top of the other not only shout out the symbolic patriarchal order of the language, but also a kind of hidden entrapment, and draw attention to the speed with which the ambition to expose its content turns into a necessity to hide it.
The use of exercise books has a thematic connection to the digital prints which Lotan fills with architectural plans of a school of a different sort, using different materials. The exercise books are not only meant to signify the home where there are children who are studying; they are the blank slate, the tabula rasa on which our culture records its own content, and leaves its impression on us. The dysfunctional use of embroidery, the "unnatural" meeting between the sewing machine and the exercise book, voids the stereotypes of their obvious meaning and demands that we challenge their usage in our language. The need to "unfamiliarize" the connotations is also expressed by the way the crude embroidery blocks out the surface of the exercise books, allowing their content to be written simply by a needle and thread. This is another attempt to cover male-chauvinism with the "feminine" needle and thread through embroidery which can be unraveled.
There is another current flowing under the surface of the exhibition by which the political element hides itself behind a curtain and re-examines the meaning of "home." The digital prints of various houses impose a strong and impressive visual presence to the exhibition. At first sight, they don't offer any overly-significant experience. They do entice us with their size, their dominant colors, iconic forms and the numerous levels of intellectual challenges requiring interpretation. Several of the images seem to have been borrowed from the forms and colors present in propaganda posters. The red and black colors command awareness, either on a personal or collective level.
In some instances the digital outlines are preserved as if they weren't actually derived from a computer; many of the images are of a house disguised, stained and sealed hermetically under the surface of the manipulations made possible by Photoshop. The program of graphic design, resembling a language of its own, is enlisted here not only as a tool for work, but also as a metaphor on exposure/concealment; on the need to employ the use of words to "visualize" the image.
By utilizing Photoshop and preserving the computerized texture of the work, Lotan conducts an interesting dialogue with the computerized forms appearing on the screen, such as asci and ansi, the characters encoding computer language. Lotan "weaves" her houses in a place where raw materials are superfluous when using digital processing, as opposed to the raw materials employed in traditional craft making. The query is not only ontologically or philosophically related, but raises a simple, naïve question: When, if ever, will the house fully match the blueprint, to what extent would the gap between the two be the only possible way of presenting a home.
The repetitive digital processing built around housing, using structural layers, is superimposed on Lotan's own photography. These are photographs of wood constructions, or the framework of houses photographed in China, reminders of a different culture and way of life. Both the photographed images and their digital processing draw their rhetorical strength, and perhaps their aesthetics, from the intermediate, incomplete stage in which we see the constructions "frozen" in the photographic image - houses that will forever be in the process of becoming a home. This stage of "putting things together" pushes the observer to the "twilight zone" between the existing structure and our idea of what we would like it to become. As for the photographs this step in the process exhibits the artist's compassion and elicits associations of all sorts of situations which are "less than perfect" and the importance of our measured capacity to reconcile ourselves to them.
The image of houses in general, and the upside down shadow of the tree, the red roof, the architectural plans, the obliteration of them, the dominant palette, and the persistent copying of one iconic image, almost exclusively, appear to be an attempt to sew a dress for the house, and then to allow it to unravel. But the end result is often similar to the case of the "emperor's new clothes." The attempt to dress it with one layer after another actually detracts from its content, reaches out to its essence and categorizes it into a meaning that fades away into an abstract idea. Only the unraveled edges bring some life to the houses.