Bat-Ami Rivlin
Bio: Bat-Ami Rivlin (b.1991) is a sculpture and mixed media artist based in New York City. Her work focuses on found materials that explore bodily functionalities in different social and artificial spaces. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as David & Schweitzer Contemporary, NARS Foundation Gallery, BronxArtSpace, Time Square Space, and Knockdown Center. Rivlin is the recipient of awards such as the SVA Bronze Casting grant at the MANA Contemporary Ben Keating Foundry, the David Berg Foundation Scholarship, and the Artis Fund Scholarship. Her work was featured in publications such as ArtSlant, Peripheral Vision Arts, and BTR Today.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: I construct ‘bodies’ out of scavenged furniture, home appliances, and other common products. These objects, which we experience on a daily basis: a mattress, bathtub, or sofa; are tailored for the human body and thus inherit some of its properties.
The objects intertwine and act upon each other; constraining, puncturing, pushing— probing their material forms. The forms investigate their own “flesh”, exposing their inner structural configurations and fillings; springs contorting out of a mattress, foam slipping out of a sofa.
In their failed attempts to perform bodily functions they become amalgamates of material domesticity, assemblages of fragmented utilities, unraveling in form and material as they perform their broken practical purposes.
The used objects retain aspects of their manufactured forms, thus pointing to the process of deterioration that products and bodies undergo. The expression of material exhaustion and decline in my work, usually shunned from social spaces such as the home, reasserts a material reality, and points to the inevitable progression of age. The material, slowly overtaking the identity of the object, eats away at the utilitarian form, leaving it in the in between space—not inanimate nor alive.
L to R: Untitled (Sink, fan, garbage bags, towel), (15" × 44" × 51", Found object sculpture, 2019); Untitled (Fence, foam, springs, LED, ballast, chord, polyfil),(40" × 75" × 100", Found object sculpture, 2019); Untitled (Bed frame, tarp, duct tape, foam), (51" × 47" × 36", Found object sculpture, 2019); Untitled (Mattress, foam, wire), (35" × 35" × 25", Found object sculpture, 2018)