Nava Lubelski  

FABRIC ARTIST

Nava Lubelski was born and raised in New York City and currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Lubelski has had recent solo shows at LMAK projects in New York and at OH&T Gallery in Boston. Her work was recently included in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts & Design in Manhattan, the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC and the Queens Museum of Art in Queens, NY, where her work is part of the permanent collection. Lubelski was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2008 and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in 2005. She was Artist-in-Residence at CUE Art Foundation in New York City and McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC in 2007. Lubelski received a degree in Russian Literature & History from Wesleyan University and spent a year as a student in Moscow, Russia.

“My work engages a variety of materials and techniques, focusing on hybridizing notions of masculine/feminine, arts/crafts and painting/sculpture. The embroidery works on canvas explore the contradictions between the impulse to destroy and the compulsion to mend. I juxtapose rapid acts of destruction, such as spilling and cutting, with painstaking, restorative labor. Embroideries are hand-stitched over stains and rips, contrasting the accidental with the meticulous, constructing narrative from randomness and mistake. The initial marks are found on linens or are created by cutting and staining canvas. The work scrambles expressions of aggression with masochistic patience and sublimation and plays with the feminine through the graphic form of the “stain” and the adding of peek-a-boo, lace inlays to repair cut holes that expose the hidden space behind the canvas.”