Naama Tsabar makes performances, installations, and sculptures exploring the relationship of power, social structures, and sound. Informed by rock culture, Minimalism, and Joseph Beuys’s ideas on social sculpture, her sculptures consist of geometric shapes that produce sound while encouraging movement and direct engagement. Tsabar collaborates with musicians and audience members to generate sound for her works, aiming to shift the relationship between the art and the viewer. Working with female or gender nonconforming musicians, she often creates performances using her instruments, converting gallery spaces into live concerts.
Tsabar’s series Works on Felt evokes nocturnal environments. She uses dark as a means of referencing the classical conception of the nocturne in music. Work on Felt (Variation 8) is a wall-mounted, dark-blue sculpture with a piano string attached to a guitar-tuning peg. The work has an amplifier that enhances the sound. In museum galleries, it can either be observed or activated. Work on Felt (Variation 8) proposes a series of different engagements with viewing audiences: as a traditional work of art, a live instrument, and a musical performance with the artist.
Identification
Title
Work on Felt (Variation 8), Dark Blue
Production Date
2020
Object Number
2020.086
Credit Line
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by PAMM’s Collectors Council with additional contributions provided by Karen Bechtel, Evelio and Lorena Gomez, Jorge M. Pérez, and Craig Robins