Alumna Bat-Ami Rivlin ’19 in Solo Exhibition ‘No Can Do’

M 2 3 presents No Can Do, a solo exhibition by alumna Bat-Ami Rivlin ’19 in New York, NY.

Rivlin’s first solo exhibition at M 2 3 features recent works. They’re sculptures all titled with industrial incantations that conjure larger systems, if only to be released from their terms. 

Materials are described as “found” in a variety of ways, such as “the gate of a chain link fence jutting out from the wall that has been softened by the addition of foam padding at hip-height, as if by a worker who had bumped into its lock or latch one too many times,” M 2 3’s Mira Dayal writes.  

Dayal continues, “All of these objects were, in fact, previously used or cast off. Yet here, moved off the construction site or out of the factory or beyond the institution, the materials’ new arrangements and functions are either too abbreviated or too exaggerated to be vernacular, the objects too isolated to fully deliver on their promises to insulate, to bind, to soften, or to undergird. Rather, they perform, Rivlin notes, the shadow of a function. Ranked by utility, just below functional objects are demonstrative objects, and just below demonstrative objects are sculptures.” 

The fractured coherence of the sculptures heighten the visibility of the operations that facilitate our presence, our institutions, and our habitation. The sculptures extract the component, isolate it, and see what its failure tells us about the larger system to which it belonged. 

Rivlin (Israeli, b. 1991) is a New York based artist. Rivlin utilizes found and surplus objects to create installation and sculptural works that explore conceptual spaces between object ontology, material function, and bodily characteristics. 

No Can Do opens February 12 and runs through March 21, 2021. M 2 3 is hosting an opening reception for the exhibition on Friday, February 12.