About witnessing neuronal scapes:
“I do not write about, I write besides. I never think I am writing about something. I don’t want to render the people around me into a meaningful nugget, I want to just scribble along side. That feels truer”.
Ocean Vuong
2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science/ Science Magazine Headquarters
For me, neurons, viruses, proteins, and crystals aren’t abstractions—they are figures, objects, and nano- scale landscapes. Captivated by these minute formations, I interpret them in their intricate environments, which inform scientists' communal imagination. With my background as an artist and physical chemist, I maintain ongoing conversations with practicing biologists and chemists and follow current developments. I distill virtual scientific data into paintings onto translucent fabric or fragile paper which I often layer to construct three-dimensional works.
Following a couple of personal events in my family, I began reading and thinking about the complexity of our brain and its fragility. I created fabric paintings of neuronal shapes based on the currently available online brain maps, microscopy imagery and old scientific drawings. I constructed my current painting installations from layers sets of large works on translucent fabric. Suspended in adjacent sequences that, configures a path through a collection of imaginary brain maps, leading the viewer to observe the neuronal territory from within. Along the Field Guide path, the viewers decipher the synaptic shapes and interpret them as a language of form. Some signs are more familiar while they discover the new ones through a walk inside the space. I devote each section to a different type of neuron, following the 19th century concept of species classification. In the same spirit, I presented the work as a series of dioramas that I was am so impressed by in Natural History museums, moved by their seductive yet menacing nature. For me, the magnified crowded wire-like bodies transform electrical signals and chemical forms that make up our sensations and build out thoughts and feelings. Their nature is so fragile, yet it works so wonderfully.
I constructed my current painting installations from layers sets of large works on translucent fabric. Suspended in adjacent sequences that, configures a path through an imaginary brain map, leading the viewer to observe the neuronal territory from within.
The translucent layers facilitate multiple angular views of the magnified neurons and concentrate on the vulnerability of our scientific perception of the brain. The changes of view with the angle of observation reflect the tentative nature of viewing these complex bio-architectures. Painting the unseen taps into what was always known intuitively, but in my work it is made real by following current methods in neurology, such as MRI microscopy, Brainbow analysis and AI mapping and more.
2022 Changwon Sculpture Biennale S. Korea
From Synapses to Free Will
Are our thoughts and movements are ours, or are they controlled by our brains? Nobody is really neurotypical: we are infinitely complicated and each is unique. This was always known intuitively, but new methods in neurology, such as brainbow analysis and AI mapping, make this diversity undeniable. Michal Gavish -- an artist and physical chemist -- began her neurological portraits by collaborating with Prof. Ronen at the University of California in San Francisco and other scientists around the world. She distills their findings into art, following personal family connections to the layered effects of our free will and neurodiversity.
Volta New York
Using X-ray structures and statistical results from recent scientific publications, I express the physical and social implications of viral genetics data. In my hand-made paintings I abstract Mandalas shaped viruses and array formations of big-data into colorful images and graphs, mapping their connection to the body, identity, inequality, and the environment. Adopting their symmetries, I interpret and layer the shapes of the generated data, inventing my own intricate combinations and staging the stormy scenario and the delicate balance between the virus and our vitality.
Ballad of Spread
During the past year my work concentrates on viral research. I paint and make installations relating to viruses and to their social and biological implications. I investigate the visual potential of the spherical harmony of viruses and the angular claims of their global distribution graphs. The visuals brings up clarity and ambiguousness at the same time in their seductive color fields and looming consequences.
Genetix
Working at the intersection of art and biology, I experiment in my new series with the color field displays generated by genetic sequencing research. Adopting the molecular modeling color-language that I have learned as a scientist, I transform colorful big-data displays into hand-made paintings and drawings, giving a new presence to these records of living formations. Using collaborative microscopic and spectroscopic results from laboratory researchers, I investigate the social implications of genetics data and their connection to issues ranging from personal identity to emergent diseases and environmental degradation. Layering the data-generated color combinations, I examine the delicate balance that is essential for the complexity and vitality of bio-structures.
Nano Portraiture
The microscope is an essential tool for Michal Gavish, a former research chemist who now specializes in “Nano Portraiture,” the title of her show at the BlackRock Center for the Arts. The D.C. artist renders DNA sequences and protein samples in large 3-D constructions, which are echoed by smaller paintings of the same or a similar subject.
The red blotches depict protein in a piece that layers two compositions on diaphanous fabric atop another on paper. Another assemblage positions dabs of blue, red and green — representing DNA — on ribbons of paper, plastic and tissue tied in a bowlike helix. DNA is also the crux of “Fine Mess,” whose bars of color are painted horizontally on long strips of paper that hang nearly from ceiling to floor. Gavish gives tiny things an outsized presence.
Mark Jenkins, Washington Post January 2019
Crystal Architecture
To a chemist, urban structures are familiar: they look naturally constructed, growing like crystals in a laboratory. Michal Gavish, originally a chemist studying these structures, now creates large, handmade prints of cityscapes from her past in the manner of the crystals she used to study. In her new exhibition Crystalline City, Gavish hxhibits large installations deconstructing the street views of Washington, DC and New York neighborhoods that she used to live in.
Gavish rearranges her photography-based images of city buildings into geometries that extend vertically. She recasts familiar city streets into invented layouts, instilling undercurrents of turmoil in the magnificent, quiet buildings. She builds scaffoldings of infinitely long rows of windows and columns. These careful compositions of multiple lines, squares and rectangles display magnificent patterns of crystalline-like geometries.
Printed on translucent fabric layers, the vacant structures become intimate memories of contemporary archaeological sites. These images emerge like thin embroidery patterns that sometimes appear flat and at other moments are three-dimensional.