CHELLIS BAIRD, TIRTZAH BASSEL, LUIZA GOTTSCHALK, TAMARA KOSTIANOVSKY, & NAOMI SAFRAN-HON
Slag & RX New York
522 W 19th Street, New YorkSeptember 06, 2024 to October 12, 2024
Opening reception September 06, 2024, 6 - 8 PMFoundation op.cit.
Cave painting residency
Mexico City
August 3rd - 25th, 2024TIME TO RETURN
RX & SLAG, PARIS
16 rue des Quatre Fils - 75003 Paris
03/09/2024 - 04/13/2024The Joan Mitchell Fellowship annually recognizes and supports 15 US-based artists working in the evolving fields of painting and sculpture. Encompassing long-term financial support, skills development, and community building, the multi-year Fellowship structure provides critical resources that artists need to sustain their practices.
Read in the studio interview.
NAOMI SAFRAN-HON
SOFT POWER
RX Gallery
16 rue des Quatre Fils - 75003 Paris
12/03/2022 - 01/14/2023SOFT POWER
BONISSON ART CENTER
177 route des Mauvares, 13840 Rognes, France
June 17, 2022 to September 25, 2022
Opening reception June 17, 2022, 5-9 PMTIGHT CONNECTIONS
Slag RX Gallery
522 West 19th Street, New York
January 27, 2022 to March 05, 2022
Opening reception January 27, 2022, 6-8PMThere's No Place Like Home
Seph Rodney
New York Time
May 15, 2020All My Lovers
Naomi Safran-Hon
Slag Gallery
522 West 19th Street, New York
April 20, 2020 to June 20, 2020Lecture, Material Conflict: A Conversation with Tomashi Jackson and Naomi Safran-Hon
Thursday, June 6, 2019, 5:30 pm
The Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street (at York Street) New Haven, ConnecticutArtists Tomashi Jackson, M.F.A. 2016, and Naomi Safran-Hon, M.F.A. 2010, incorporate both traditional and nontraditional materials in their artwork to engage in contemporary cultural conflict. The two will hold a conversation moderated by a conservator, who will probe how the artists’ use of materials in their visually engaging and inventive work relates to themes of political, racial, global, and personal conflict.
This conversation is the keynote for the 2019 Historically Black Colleges and Universities Students and Mentors Institute in Technical Art History (HBCU SMITAH), a weeklong workshop hosted by the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, Yale University, and generously funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Hot Picks 2018
Smack MellonA Room with No Exit
Naomi Safran-Hon
Slag Gallery
56 Bogart St. Brooklyn NY
February 16, 2018 to April 01, 2018
Opening reception February 16, 2018, 7-9PMFragments of Place
Marfa Contemporary
Curated by Julie Maguire
January 15 - April 15, 2017Art OMI Residency
June 16 - July 11, 2016Art Omi Weekend: Open Studios
Sunday, July 10, 1 - 5 PM
The Studio Barns
1405 Co Rte 22, Ghent, NY 12075With Passion
June 3 – July 17, 2016
Group Show
Curated by: Naomi Lev and Jovana Stokic.
Slag Contemporary
56 Bogart St.
Brooklyn, NY 11206Opening: Friday June 3rd // 7-9pm
VOLTA 12 Art Fair
Basel Switzerland
June 13-18, 2016
Slag Gallery Booth C6Out Of Sight
(group show)
Haifa Museum of Art
26 Shabbetai Levi Street, Haifa, 3304331, Israel.Opening 16th of May, 2015 at 8:00 pm
VOLTA NY
MARCH 5–8, 2015An invitational solo project fair for contemporary art.
NEW LOCATION: PIER 90, NEW YORKNAOMI SAFRAN-HON
Slag Gallery
56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206, USA
info@slaggallery.comBorn 1984 in Oxford, U.K.
Naomi Safran-Hon received a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Yale University in 2010 and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art and Art History from Brandeis University in 2008. She is also a 2012 Skowhegan Residency alumnus.
Naomi Safran-Hon' new body of work is an investigation into her relationship to the place she grew up and it's on going conflict. She returned to her hometown of Haifa to photograph places that have been abandoned for the past half-century following a mass Palestinian exodus. But this work is far from an over-politicalized statement on Israeli–Palestinian relations or simple ruin porn. Rather, through her process, Safran-Hon’s pieces challenge the viewer to reconsider preconceptions about materials, the notion of home as a physical locus, and the role of destruction as a negative force.
The duality of household items and refuse, the suggestion of livable spaces and the reality of abandoned buildings, is mirrored in the connection between the beauty of the works themselves and the destructive process used to create them. In the end, these pieces reveal the fragility of human experience and the complicated nature of one’s home. Destruction — both intentional, at the hands of the artist, and incidental, as the result of time and desertion — recasts the viewer’s notion of "hard times" in terms of geopolitical conflict, irresolvable nostalgia, and the personal struggle to find one’s place in the world, both physical and psychological.
HARD TIMES: PAINTINGS
NAOMI SAFRAN-HON
SEP 5 - OCT 5, 2014OPENING RECEPTION, FRIDAY, SEP 5, 6-9 PM
Slag Gallery
56 Bogart Street, Ground Floor
Brooklyn NY 11206
T 212 967 9818 F 212 967 9819
INFO@SLAGGALLERY.COM
THURSDAY- SUNDAY, 1 pm-6 pm
MONDAY-WEDNESDAY BY APPOINTMENTSlag Gallery is proud to present HARD TIMES: PAINTINGS, a solo exhibition featuring the latest paintings and drawings from Israeli artist Naomi Safran-Hon. To create these works, Safran-Hon returned to her hometown of Haifa to photograph places that have been abandoned for the past half-century following a mass Palestinian exodus—a migration whose causes and effects differ depending on the historical narrative to which one subscribes. But this work is far from an over-politicalized statement on Israeli–Palestinian relations or simple ruin porn. Rather, through her process, Safran-Hon’s pieces challenge the viewer to reconsider preconceptions about materials, the notion of home as a physical locus, and the role of destruction as a negative force.
Safran-Hon uses a unique process to transform her photographs into evocative paintings with strong impressionist undertones. Cutting holes in the pictures, she pushes concrete through lace and these empty spaces then paints on top of the work, imbuing each piece with a sculptural quality whose dimensionality causes the eye to stick in the nooks and crannies of the work, lingering over objects—some immediately recognizable, some requiring effort to piece back together. The objects that populate “Hard times paintings” are the quotidian signifiers of domestic life: simple doors and windows, soda bottles, a sheet stretched like a bed across the floor. Mixed with these, the ephemera of abandoned places pervade the works: chipped paint, empty boxes, old gas cans, and other rubbish. This duality of household items and refuse, the suggestion of livable spaces and the reality of abandoned buildings, is mirrored in the connection between the beauty of the works themselves and the destructive process used to create them.
In the end, these pieces reveal the fragility of human experience and the complicated nature of one’s home. Destruction—both intentional, at the hands of the artist, and incidental, as the result of time and desertion—recasts the viewer’s notion of the show’s titular subject, “hard times,” in terms of geopolitical conflict, irresolvable nostalgia, and the personal struggle to find one’s place in the world, both physical and psychological.
Makom: Chronicle of Absentees
Naomi Safran-Hon
12.01 – 24.02.2013
Brandt Gallery
Herengracht 68
1015 BR AmsterdamMakom is the Hebrew word for place. In the show Makom: Chronicle of Absentees Naomi explores the relationship between the place she grew up and its disputed histories, as well as the ties between private stories and the political forces that changed the landscape. Using cement and lace she is able to address both domestic spaces as well as brutal architectural structures, that shape the reality of our day-to-day life. The mixing of these materials allows Safran-Hon to explore the tension between home and its destruction.
Makom: Chronicle of Absentees includes three different series of work. The series Home Invasion is a body of work tackling directly the invasion of the political world, i.e. war and violence, into the private space of the home. In these pieces she photographs the homes of her family in Israel, and in the creative process she destroys them, using cement and lace as symbolic materials. Thus the material invades the pictorial space. Naomi cuts part of the original photo, usually windows, doorframes or light fixtures and replaces them with cement that was forced through lace. Although the photograph is absent in few pieces the relationship to an interior domestic space is enhanced by the use of window frames and the repetition of blue lace that echoes curtains and wallpaper.
The second series of smaller work titled Cast Lead, named after the Israeli Army military operation of 2008-9 in the Gaza Strip, uses another kind of imagery. All the images in this series were downloaded from newspaper sites on the Internet and depict the brutal invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Naomi on the third series: ‘Wadi Salib: Interior Wall (pink light switch)’: This piece stands as a link between the two major bodies of work in this show. In this piece instead of destroying the image I attempted to restore the space of a home that was left vacant by its original homeowners. In this series I use photographs I shot in my hometown, Haifa, of houses that were left behind in the war of 1948. I replace part of the dilapidated spaces with cement and lace, trying to patch up its history and retell the story of the absent homeowners.
TWO TIMES GRAY
Naomi Safran-Hon and Shirley Wegner
November 30 - January 6, 2013Opening Reception: Friday, November 30, 6-9 PM
Slag Contemporary
56 Bogart St.
Brooklyn, NY 11237
L Train to Morgan Stop
T 212 967 9818 F 212 967 9819
Thursday - Monday 12-6 PM
Sunday by appointment
http://slaggallery.com/GO: a Community-Curated Open Studio Project
Adrian Coleman, Oliver Jeffers, Naomi Safran-Hon
Gabrielle Watson and Yeon Ji Yoo
December 1 - February 24, 2013Opening Reception: Saturday, December 1, 5-10 PM
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11238
2/3 Train to Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
Wednesday - Sunday 11 AM - 6 PM
Defensive Shield
In collaboration with The International Museum of Contemporary Culture
IMOCC can be seen Tuesday and Thursday en-route in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx between 3:00 pm and 6:00 pm, January 23 through February 23, 2012For specific location and time please contact
Imagine a dress, a garment, which you can wear, that will protect you from the world around you. It will guard you from all worldly activities, and will function like a shield, a fence between you and the rest of the world. In the project Defensive Shield the artist Naomi Safran-Hon attempted to create such a barrier in a form of a coat. Using cement, a material that is used in the construction of walls and fences, Safran-Hon creates a personal defense structure. The cement is pushed through green lace that then is stitched together to create a long overcoat. The lace is the structure that holds together the cement. By transforming the cement into a wearable garment Safran-Hon deflated its key quality of strength and stiffness. Thus making the garment’s initial purpose impossible to achieve. Creating an ironic situation whereby the cement, which was supposed to function as a shield, becomes a burden for the person wearing the overcoat.
The title of this piece refers directly to the name of the military operation "Defensive Shield" conducted in 2002 by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. By making a link between this military operation and her piece, Safran-Hon raises questions about the quality of defense and its ironic outcome.
Broken Homes
December 9th through January 22nd
Opening Reception: Friday, December 9th from 6 to 9pm
Momenta will be closed for the holidays from 12/20 though 1/5Momenta Art
56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn NY 11206
718.218.8058 info@momentaart.org
Gallery Hours: Thu through Mon, 12-6pm
Momenta Art is pleased to present Broken Homes, a group show featuring work by Francis Cape, Kate Gilmore, Lisa Kirk, Marni Kotak, Anthony Marchetti, Gordon Matta-Clark, Kirsten Nelson, Leah Oates, Naomi Safran-Hon and Peter Scott.
The exhibition Broken Homes presents physical and metaphorical ruptures in domestic spaces. Some of the work in Broken Homes addresses the physical nature of home, the structures and detritus that create illusions of stability and comfort, while others more directly confront the realities of growing up in a variety of unconventional and dysfunctional environments. In whichever direction these works lean, the idea of home remains a contested site for each of us, psychologically and politically. It is a contest that is never resolved. To deconstruct the idea of home is to threaten to dissolve the person formed therein. From Tea Party definitions of marriage to Occupy Wall Street tent cities, notions of home become notions of the ideal community and notions of community become formal questions played out in architecture, planning, and law. To break apart these notions is to promise both the renewal of revolution and the dissolution of hysteria.Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting provides the axis upon which the exhibition rests. A home physically split, it is an attack upon the “typical family home" as described by Matta-Clark -- both as archetype and architecture. The splitting of Matta-Clark’s seminal work is further dissected by the other artists in this show, who present both dream and reality.
Peter Scott and Lisa Kirk expose the hyperbole of “Lifestyle Culture." Scott’s photographs set in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the lower East Side juxtapose idealized billboard representations of luxury interiors with the more mundane reality of scaffolding, sidewalk sheds and detritus, making evident the violence underlying urban renewal. Kirk’s House of Cards was a 2009 installation consisting of a showroom model shanty created from 52 separate pieces of found materials sourced from stalled or abandoned development projects. Actors posing as real estate agents greeted visitors and attempted to sell time-shares in a “private residence club” called Maison Des Cartes. Both artists shine a critical light onto the spectacle of capitalism following the fall of the housing market.
Inconsistencies concerning ideals, reality, form, and function are brought to the forefront in the works of Francis Cape, Naomi Safran-Hon and Kirsten Nelson. Cape juxtaposes post-Katrina photos of New Orleans with stark and partially assembled pieces of furniture modeled after a post-war British government program of approved furniture designs. Safran-Hon’s works present photographs of interiors in Israel cut and penetrated with cement -- suggestive of the intrusions into domestic life by the military realities outside. Nelson’s sculptures are carefully crafted from common home building materials such as sheetrock and wood moldings. The works echo the domestic interiors upon which they are based, but exist in a state of suspended reference. Hovering between what they seem to be and what they seem to be lacking, the work represents an invented fragment of a non-existent whole, evoking a sense of the uncanny and the humorous.
The photographs by Anthony Marchetti and Leah Oates document traces of humanity. Oates photographs the detritus created by urbanization in Taipei. A boarded up building, a cart piled high with salvaged cardboard to be sold, and a colorful pile of objects thrown out of a window during a domestic dispute- all reflect the incongruities of poverty and progress in developing urban areas. Marchetti’s photographs are more subdued, using the sometimes-distant aesthetic of documentary photography to reveal a glimpse into the private lives of suburban dwellers. Marchetti photographed the rooms of suburban tract homes after their tenants had vacated, presenting a context without objects rather than an object without context.
Kate Gilmore and Marni Kotak examine the divisions and obstacles often present even within physical spaces that appear to be unified. Gilmore is the protagonist of her video, in which she is trapped in an attic-like space surrounded by furniture. Gilmore struggles to discard furniture through a hole in the floor, creating a haphazard pile which eventually provides a means of escape. Kotak’s site-specific installation Christmas in South Carolina recreates elements of Kotak’s family Christmas vacation in 2010. A live Christmas tree is festively decorated with photos and text that recount the fighting and dysfunction that ultimately drove the artist and her sister to escape the hostility and give up on any pretense of familial bliss.
For more information about this exhibition, further images, and artist bios, please visit our website.
Absent Present
February 24 - April 2, 2011Opening Reception
Thursday, February 24th, 6-8 PMSlag Gallery
531 West 25th st, Ground 10
New YorkThe LABA Gallery at the 14th Street Y presents -
Patterns of Invasions
Naomi Safran-Hon and Doron Langberg
Curated by Tzili Charney
June 17 - September 2010The LABA Gallery
344 East 14th Street
between 1&2 Ave.
Monday to Thursday 6 AM to 10 PM
Friday 6 AM to 9 PM
Saturday-Sunday 7 AM to 9 PMTHESIS SHOW
April 20 - 24
Closing Reception
Saturday April 24th 6 - 9 PM
Yale School of Art
Green Gallery
1156 Chapel St.
New Haven CTOPEN STUDIO
Saturday
May 8th 2010
12 00 PM
Yale School of Art
Painting and Printmaking
Studio 203
353 Crown St.
New Haven CT
