Nava Waxman at the Engine Gallery

Pic: Photos courtesy of Engine Gallery

Israeli artist Nava Waxman’s new show is now on at Engine Gallery in the Distillery District through Nov. 17. Waxman last showed in the historic Toronto area in 2008, when her work was situated at the nearby Blue Dot Gallery. Her latest show is an embrace of personal themes relating to feminine identity, filtered through a fairy-tale-like world of shapes and symbols.

Waxman’s paintings are a sepia-toned collection of encaustic (essentially melted wax) and mixed media (including paper collages, and found copper objects), all of which are carefully arranged to render her fantastical, airy-tale like images of birds, moons, wilderness and geometrical patterns. While her works may seem barren, a closer inspection reveals a world full and ripe with exploration and a personal narrative of awakening. Intuition in its passive form #81 features a leafless tree, its fat trunk rich in texture and detail, looking like something out of a Louis Carroll storybook it’s set against a washed-out sky and situated on a platform featuring snippets of lettering, around which two colourful fish float by amidst a half-drawn circle. A tower with wire –perhaps a telephone poll (which is a constant in all the works on display) –is off to one side. These basic themes –of intellectualism coming into contact and dancing emotionalism –crop up time and again in every work in the exhibition. Circles are a particular theme, with Waxman carefully avoiding the obvious female metaphorical imagery and sticking with washed-out colours and geometrical computations with many of them. A large yellow moon dominates Incomparable Freedom instead, and colour, along with rich detail, are given to the two elephants who are crossing the wires running across the pale, lemon-y lunar surface.

The predominance of wires, poles, animals, geometric patterns, lettering and circles suggests a precarious connection, if not outright tension, between the worlds of the tangible and intangible. In her Artist’s Statement, Waxman writes that she is "interested in portraying a landscape of our time, as well as the timeless qualities of nature. Human narratives are constant in my work. Raw images, personal experiences and thoughts, no matter how abstract or fleeting they may be, all contribute to the delicate balance.” This balance is nicely reflected in the tension between the vertical poles, with their loping lines of wire, and the half-finished, spinning geometric patterns, that dance with the delicately detailed birds and elephants of the works. Waxman also effectively incorporates the written word into some works, describing them at the exhibition’s opening as a kind of stream-of-consciousness impression not necessarily connected to the work itself. "Whether it is a random thought passing with barely a notice, or a stream of consciousness that I have been able to record more formally, the written word seems to compliment my narrative landscape.” Words, animals, shapes –all tiny fragments making up the fascinating, girl-meets-woman landscape of Waxman’s works. Run, don’t walk, to the Engine Gallery, for a trip to a distinctly different world of modern fairy tales.