Noa Raviv (2017)

Reporter: Annie Armstrong
Source: Noa Raviv

Noa Raviv is perhaps best-known as the early adopter of 3D printing to do 3D printing in fashion well. Over the last three years alone, Raviv has prompted the likes of VogueVICE, and Forbes to tout her as one of the fashion industry's brightest up-and-comers—a claim that intensified, in beats, surrounding her involvement in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s record-breaking exhibition "Manus x Machina."

But these days, Raviv tells us she's turning her attention to sculpture and installation; and in the case of an artist noted for letting her work descend into chaos, the resulting expierments are taking elaborate and curious turns.

“As an artist, letting go is often the hardest thing,” Raviv said in a recent email interview. The comment was made in reference to her newest series of digital sketches, A Matter of Form. At first glance, the works in question—a loose assemblage of abstract sculptures—appear algorithmic: a collection of gridded objects floating like satellites through empty space. Look a little closer, and the forms appear to have a lace-like haze over them, as though mildew or rust is coating their bodies.

Raviv sent her digital sketches to a 3D-printing lab in Toronto, where the objects were printed without her present to supervise or control the process. The subsequent wireframes were then put through a crystallization process, coating the objects in artificial crystals that simulate the chemical phenomenon.

The abstract sketches in A Matter of Form blend the controlled and the disordered, the hand-made and the computer-made, the antiquaited and the futuristic. We spoke with the artist on why she thinks the series fits into the post-digital art narrative.

Read the full interview on NEW INC STREAM.