Michal Nachmany

Michal Nachmany
New York, New York, USA

STATEMENT

A central theme of Michal Nachmany’s work is that “every person and every object has a journey.” Her work focuses on the ways personal and cultural journeys are captured in memories and objects, with work that reimagines and repurposes found objects of daily life. As an immigrant from Israel to New York, she explores the journeys of people and their keepsakes from a personal perspective.

Nachmany’s technique combines mixed media, including collage, printmaking, and sculptural installation, to sew together swatches of life through images, colors, and words. She uses collage as a medium to create new stories about the memories and histories evoked by the objects used in her work. In this way she juxtaposes themes of personal and cultural narrative, nostalgia, and repetition using memorabilia, legal contracts, letters, photo albums, matchbooks, postcards, and other found objects from daily life.

By bringing together different elements in new ways, she seeks to open up dialogues between the objects, as well as between the people who attend her shows. These artistic dialogues create a space for communities to come together to connect over art, and share memories.

As Nachmany has exhibited her work across different communities, she has observed that collecting objects and preserving memories from the past occurs in varied forms across many different cultures
and communities. The act of collecting represents a universal desire to preserve fragments of the past through its physical manifestations, while continuing to move forward in a rapidly changing world with new stories and new keepsakes. The techniques of mixed-media and collage allow memories to be recreated and repurposed within a community, a family, or on an individual level. In her art, Nachmany explores this dichotomy by relating these objects through new forms that give these images and stories additional layers, recreated meanings, and new beginnings.

BIO

Michal Nachmany is self-taught collage and mixed-media artist who has exhibited in solo shows in the US, Taiwan, and Poland. She has led collage workshops in New York City and elsewhere in the US, as well as during her international shows. Nachmany is also an educator who teaches modern and liturgical Hebrew in rabbinical schools, synagogues, and elsewhere.

Now living in New York City, Nachmany grew up in Jerusalem, a city of many collages, where the mixture of cultures, people, architecture, objects, colors, sounds, and smells from the streets and the markets shaped her awareness of the past as a foundation of the present.

Beyond her solo and group shows, Nachmany created collage works by commission. For example, she was commissioned by Columbia University to create works for the university’s permanent collection on display at the university’s Faculty House. Nachmany’s series of ten artworks, “Living Monuments”, celebrates the inauguration of the university’s new Manhattanville Urban Campus, while paying a tribute
to the history of this Upper Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, as well as to New York City’s Riverside Park landmarks and history.

ARTIST CONTACT

(646) 642-4450
[click to email]
www.michalnachmanyart.com

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