Danielle Feldhaker | OPAQUE AND TRANSPARENT

Danielle Feldhaker | OPAQUE AND TRANSPARENT

“I was born in New York and the influence of the urban space, street art, graffiti, the glass-clad tower high-rise, and the city reflected in them, along with the local urban landscape of Tel Aviv, where I grew up, are ingrained in my creative realm.

My works address notions associated with the haphazardness, demarcated territories, or transient shelters in the context of acute global issues concerning the future and integrity of our planet.
I have been creating site-specific installations and sculptural objects in recent years, using ready-mades and materials extracted from the mundane and functional office life.
Electrical and plastic cables, sockets and plugs, fluorescent and LED lights, PVC sheets and bubble wrap, and other ready-mades undergo a process of transformation into new material and geometrical syntax.
These come together and formulate a constructive language that transports the material from its physical dimension into sculptural, poetic, symbolic, and conceptual realms.

This work process, which disrupts the common function and purpose of the various elements, emerges a new language and aesthetics embodied by complex assemblages that resonate with their original function. One example is nylon filaments’ use to “weave” long thin fluorescent lights, creating a free-standing sculptural and structural system. For me, the objects and the space around them, function together like screens or divides of sorts, allowing the viewer intimacy and respite.

My practice layers and processes are uncovered in installations that combine transparent PVC sheets, which I use as support for a range of techniques. The transparent plastic surface allows, exposes the stages of my work process, revealing what happens “backstage” and connecting the inside with the outside, the front with the back.
Due to the support’s transparency, the painted elements appear to be “floating,” breaking away from it to space. In Tube A, a piece comprising soft PVC sheets, I created a 3-meter high cylindrical shelter of sorts, which the viewers could enter. Its transparency undermines a sense of an impervious and protecting shelter.
Before focusing on sculpture, my primary practice involved painting on transparent plexiglass panels or plastic packaging sheets. These works maintained the tension between figurative images and abstract brushstrokes. The traces of the paint and colorful wallpaper strips echoed an urban aesthetic of towers, like a relic of an urban setting, construction and destruction, growth, and withering. Alongside formalist, geometric abstract painting, I also engaged in miniature labor-intensive elaborate drawings that resembled a cryptic and obscure language.

This was an autonomous world of images comprising many symbols, some drawn from reality, but most of them fictional.
The obsessive and labor-intensive drawing evolved into the repetitive drawing of patterns, like lacework or tapestry. Later, these were duplicated to form a digital pattern, which I used to create a textile or an “epidermal cover,” with which I clad different work surfaces.

In Eyes Wide Shut, for instance, this material shifted to Plexiglas, from which emanated a video projection of two eyes that open and close intermittently while they change color. The eyes that peek through a lace-like cover stand for a stereotypical representation of feminine craft, generating contemplation on discrimination and exclusion of women.”

Read the Full Article on Art Market Magazine Issue #49