Ofri Cnaani

Andrea Meislin Gallery is proud to announce Wrong Tools, a solo exhibition by Ofri Cnaani, curated by Adi Puterman. The show will include a participatory performance piece as well as a new series of Cnaani’s cyanotypes, or “blueprints.”

For her fourth exhibition with Andrea Meislin, Cnaani will transform the gallery’s space into a temporary office and create a participatory lab for images, where, throughout the duration of the show, she will engage with gallery visitors in one-on-one sessions, providing them with visual “readings,” a one-of-a-kind custom-made image map. 

Staged as an ad-hoc image-production station, Cnaani’s performance combines items from the visitor’s personal belongings together with objects culled from the artist’s collection of found materials to enact the live creation of a personalized image using a photocopy system and a surveillance camera. The print will be signed by the artist and given to the participant as a unique work of art, or an “original copy.” A continuous projection on the gallery’s façade will display the real-time process of assembling the objects on the working station, thus creating a digital reproduction of an image with no coherent source.

Merging a diverse range of influences from the Xerox art of the 1960s to digital media, the performance will take the shape of a spiritual “reading” in the Internet age. The structure of such “reading,” inspired by fortune tellers and tarot cards, will expand on the idea of visuality, visibility and vulnerability in the image-saturated digital culture, highlighting fundamental paradoxes of the media era.

In evoking our willingness to surrender ourselves to an omniscient digital world, Wrong Tools calls attention to the function of image making as a means of capital production, and brings forth questions on the uniqueness of a work of art in a hyper-visual reality.

Wrong Tools is an exploration of central themes in Cnaani’s work: digital media and the human body, the artist as service provider, customization and reproduction, and the economy of collections. The title of the show ties together the performative experiment with the two-dimensional works, as it is emblematic of Cnaani’s working methods—her deliberately erroneous use of technologies, and her insistence on using low-fi, imprecise techniques has ultimately evolved into a distinct vocabulary based on a collection of visual signs unique to Cnaani alone.

Ofri Cnaani is an artist and educator. In 2015 she presented a live video installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as a newly commissioned piece for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In fall 2015 she is scheduled to present a new participatory performance at the Inhotim Institute in Brazil. Cnaani's solo exhibitions and performances include: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; PS1/MoMA, NYC; BMW Guggenheim Lab, NYC; The Fisher Museum of Art, L.A.; Twister, Network of Lombardy Contemporary Art Museums, Italy; Haifa Museum of Art, Israel; and the Herzlyia Museum of Art, Israel.