‘Work on Felt’ is an ongoing series of work where raw industrial felt is transformed into modifiable stringed instruments. Through the addition of carbon fiber, piano strings and guitar tuning pegs, the felt pieces gain new features that contradict their natural character. One is immediately confronted with their minimal design and then given a chance to directly engage the work itself by plucking the strings, creating sounds from them. Tightening or loosening the strings changes the degree of the bowing of the sculptures and the sound they make. The transformative nature of the work is such that the appearance of the sculptures, their erectness or flatness, directly corresponds to the pitch they produce.
In Tsabar’s Work on Felt series, slabs of felt are layered with carbon fiber
and epoxy to create works that are sculpted through the tension introduced
by piano strings. Each Work on Felt has a set of microphones that picks
up the vibration which is then amplified by a guitar amplifier. The merging
of felt and carbon fiber lends felt, tension and rigidity. The hybrid material
subverts expectations: no longer the dampener of sound (reminiscent of
Beuys’ use of felt), but the resonating chamber itself.
In these works, sound and form are in a direct relation – the shape is
determined by the entry and exit points as well as the length of the piano
string, while the pitch of the string is changed with the shape of the work.
The Work on Felt series can be seen as referencing the history of both
Post-Minimal and Fluxus sculpture: from Robert Morris to Joseph Beuys’
social sculptures. However, it is equally in dialogue with the work of the
1970s conceptual sculptures and performances of Terry Fox and Paul Kos.
Tsabar began the ongoing Work on Felt series in 2012, with large floorbased
sculptures. In 2015, the first wall felts were exhibited introducing
a new nocturnal color palette of dark blue, black, bordeaux and purple. In
these latest Works on Felt, Tsabar introduces a new color palette that is
suggestive of warm desert landscapes with colors of copper, sandstone, and
graphite. A gentle shift, through color, from an urban nocturnal landscape
to one related to the earth. This shift suggests an expanded reading of the
works’ curves and twists as landscapes of slopes and geologic formations.