TEL AVIV.- Naama Arad’s (b. 1985) Table Mountain formulates a reality whose various dimensions are not mutually exclusive; they co-exist, side by side, as a sequence of planes. A site-specific installation, it was created especially for the Prints and Drawings Gallery, embracing its architectural features. The gallery was made into a domestic spaces consisting of inexpensive, mundane consumer goods. The unique affinities generated between the objects in the shared space result in a system of arbitrary order focused on shifting the function of common objects. The physical boundaries of the space are indeed demarcated by the ordinary walls, but the walls’ orderly marking with continuous lines of adhesive tape )via meticulous handiwork( imprints them with an elusive defamiliarization.

The marking on the wall is signified in two different, consecutive ways: at times it is perceived as a unifying, ordering modernist grid; at other times it is experienced as an all-encompassing network or as a simulation of space in a three-dimensional digital drawing, a reading which ostensibly nullifies the walls, replacing them with the constantly bustling space of the computer screen. The modernist and the digital constantly exchange places during one’s visit to the gallery. Table Mountain is thus experienced as a territory whose boundaries are blurred.

The purpose of mundane objects, which now function as components of a sculpture, indeed changed, but the resulting cross remains a “mundane object,” this time by way of representation. The inventiveness, and the lo-tech, often industrious manual labor, attest to Arad’s particular use of standard items, of conventional, universal units. Nevertheless, it seems that the unique application, with its myriad modes and manifestations, was not intended to extract the art object from the sphere of its constituent elements, but rather to leave it trapped on the surface of consumer goods. In keeping with the collapse of the familiar social distinctions in contemporary Capitalism, the principles of consumerist economy penetrate the private domain. Virtual reality in its digital translation )the media, the information economy(, which is entwined in the everyday, likewise leads to a blurring of boundaries and disintegration of distinctions, just like the experience of the hall’s walls which oscillate between demarcation of the space and its breaching.