current exhibition

Hannah Leah Israel: Stillness

February 13 to March 27

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please note the gallery has moved from Suite 20A to 8C

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Poem 88 welcomes Hannah Leah Israel for her first exhibition, Stillness, beginning February 13. Israel, who serves as the gallery director at Columbus State University, produces elegant, minimal sculptures and drawings that consider positive and negative space. These works are about mark-making and language derived from Israel’s research and travel, and guided by her own intuition. Israel arranges  rough-hewn, handmade paper and plaster vessel-shaped objects into small, totemic landscapes and creates drawings of the arrangements. 

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The three-dimensional shapes recall something primitive and primal like the arrangements of monoliths at Stonehenge; the drawings, on the other hand, remind one of Giorgio Morandi’s monochrome “landscapes” of vessels - flattened to emphasize positive and negative spaces. In discussions with Israel, Rachel Whiteread emerges as an important influence in thinking about what is absent yet evocatively, and philosophically, very present.

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Color is also an important component —  pink, yellow, and blue — informed by readily available mosquito nets ubiquitous in her birthplace in the Philippines.

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Israel says about her work:

“I create art that resembles subsets of sorting, shifting, ephemera, pasting, gathering, tearing, cutting, and patterning with the focus on paper as my initial material. I find paper fascinating because it relates so much to language that has been preserved. Through mark making using materials like ink, graphite, and other pigments, I search to imply a new meaning or language that reflects our everyday information as a form of abstraction.”