For some reason, we imagine the past holds some truth long forgotten.
And because the past itself is absent, already gone, all that is left to us is the search for the traces still permeating the present. To fashion a web of memories and the filaments of history around actual sites and objects.
This is true in the national and private spheres alike. Our immediate surroundings and their contents serve us as anchors of memory and emotion, meaning identity. We can cry about a table, smile at the site of a dresser, find solace in an armchair, a cutting board, a lamp. The physical is inseparable from the emotional.
In the solo exhibition Plywood Roots, artist Eili Levy tracks back to the core memory in furniture through an array of furniture-like objects. Echoes of furnishings from various life milestones become real in the gallery space. But unlike the genuine articles made from a range of materials, these are realized only in plywood layers.
At the center of the space Levy installed a rotary engine. A mechanical heart that pumps energy out to its extensions through rods and straps. The mechanism spans the gallery in a repetitive arrangement of motion and timing, bare to the viewers who are invited to wander across its innards.