Nava Lubelski – Crafting Fine Art

Nava Lubelski found herself in the midst of a successful art career in New York City, before moving to Asheville, North Carolina.  Having received a fellowship with a free studio program several years back she gained quick recognition as having developed a look and style all her own.  Her modernist abstractions within the fine art world combined with the modern reinvention of hand-stitched crafts allow her to bridge audiences from fine arts, design and craft.  Visit her website and you will see the quantity of shows and art publications she has been featured in recently.  A high end design magazine in Spain published her work last month.

A few things drive Nava in the creation of her art.  She has a compulsion for saving and reusing things. She can't allow waste.  So, she allows these remnants and tossed aside pieces to be a starting point for creating something new.  Nava, also, has a fascination with "the stain".  The history, the intended or accidental destruction it causes, the feminine symbolism and its ability to forever alter a place.  Following that is our need to fix things.  I'll let Nava explain it; "My work explores 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 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.  Shadows on the wall add a sculptural dimension and some pieces are hung off the wall to reveal the secret and unintended marks of the verso."