Watch the short documentary Hilla Toony Navok is available to watch at the top of the page.
Hilla Toony Navok is a multidisciplinary artist who explores abstract modernism through sculptures crafted from everyday consumer products. Navok responds to modernist design and architecture by merging and abstracting mundane objects into thought-provoking, colorful, and humorous sculptures and installations. The form, aesthetics, vibrancy, and conceptual significance of her work encourage viewers to critically examine the environment they choose to live in and its impact on their lives.
In the short documentary featuring a studio visit with Navok, directed by Ian Sternthal and commissioned by the Fireflies Project, Navok discusses her artistic approach. Although she is primarily known as a sculptor, she explains that her creative process invariably begins with drawing. Throughout her research, she visits commercial buildings, stores, offices, and public spaces to explore how these environments and systems shape human behavior. “Design carries a promise,” she asserts. Through her artworks, Navok examines this promise and questions its authenticity.
Navok’s art exhibits a distinct modernist style, marked by a clear aesthetic. Her creations delve into modernism and abstraction, emphasizing basic geometric shapes such as circles, squares, and triangles, and primary colors like blue, red, and yellow. What sets her work apart is her innovative approach to sculpture using everyday consumer products; Navok transforms these items by stripping them of their functional identities and distilling them into their most fundamental and pure forms. These forms then serve as the building blocks for her monumental sculptures, which are showcased in museums and public spaces.
Using basic materials like metal sheets, pipes, sponge, plastic, aluminum rods, and PVC fabric, Navok crafts spaces that are both familiar and alien, urging us to look beyond the mere functionality of everyday consumer products. Through the assembly and arrangement of these raw materials, Navok engages in a dialogue with modernist principles. Her meticulous and aesthetically captivating creations intrigue viewers, inviting them to examine the subtle details that embody both humor and critique, eliciting feelings of both attraction and repulsion.
Navok’s body of work also includes video art and performances. In her video piece With the Wind, With the Water, featured in the studio visit documentary, Navok engages in sculptural performance in public settings. In one sequence, she maneuvers a giant blue ball through a parking lot and across a central square in Ashdod. In another, she pulls a yellow tarp from the 27th floor of a building in Yavne down to a fountain in the local square, which includes a blue ball sculpture, thereby forming a collage in the public space. These actions challenge the design of public spaces and the art displayed within them, highlighting a sense of disconnection and alienation from the urban environments they occupy. The battle with the wind and the plunge into the fountain waters introduce a humorous dimension to the critique expressed in her work.
The emphasis on abstraction, basic shapes, and primary colors signifies a philosophical shift in modernist art that began in the late 19th century, highlighting the inner qualities of artwork rather than its ability to depict the external world. This philosophy asserts that art should transcend mere imitation of reality and instead express the artist’s deep-seated emotions, thoughts, and spiritual aspirations. Abstraction enables artists to escape the confines of traditional representation and delve into universal concepts and emotions using shapes, lines, and colors.
Primary colors are integral to this abstract approach, imbued with emotional and symbolic significance. The philosophical underpinnings of abstraction and the use of primary colors in modernism are intrinsically linked to the quest for authenticity. Abstract art strives to achieve a universal appeal, offering viewers the chance to interpret and engage with the artwork on a personal and immediate level. Navok accomplishes this by abstracting details that connect visual imagery with concrete context.
Currently, Navok is featured in two group exhibitions: “Green Through and Through” at the Eyal Ofer Pavilion, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, curated by Aya Miron, and “The Block” – From the Haaretz Collection at Minus 1 Gallery in Tel Aviv, curated by Efrat Livny.
Ian Sternthal of Sternthal Books directed and produced the short film about Hilla Toony Navok, which is featured at the top of this page, for the Fireflies Project. The Fireflies Project, led by Vered Gadish, initiated and commissioned Sternthal Books and Ian Sternthal to create a series of five short films.
