Oded Hirsch. 50 Blue, 2009; single channel video w/sound, 12:30. Courtesy of Contemporary Jewish Museum

The three artists in Work in Progress: Considering Utopia at the Contemporary Jewish Museum offer varying perspectives on attaining a social and pastoral golden age. The works are united by a shared interest in collective activity. Elisheva Biernoff’s and Ohad Meromi’s installations in painting and sculpture invite audience participation, and Oded Hirsch presents videos and photos at once documenting and fictionalizing communal labor on a kibbutz.

Biernoff’s The Tools Are In Your Hands (2013) is an enormous landscape mural painted over metal that allows viewers to apply cut-out magnets depicting plants, animals, and simple geometric forms, which can be found sorted into nearby bins.  Her flat, graphical paint application in blues, greens, and neutral tones suggest calm skies, and fertile land, inviting viewers to finish an image of a valley of well-tended farms in harmony with nature.

On the afternoon of Sunday, November 10th, however, the audience had instead produced a hurly-burly of magnetic rabbits, chickens, tree leaves, tomatoes, lemons, and abstract shapes, sometimes coalescing into mandala-like circular arrangements, sometimes canvassing wide swaths of Biernoff’s landscape in Dadaist clouds. The temporary effect, looking like a kindergarten exercise and not a picture of sustainable agriculture, deftly demonstrates one challenge facing collective action. The ideal outcome seems obvious, given the parts Biernoff provides, yet the anonymous group effort diverges wildly from any logical cohesion, throwing the specific goals of the project into doubt.

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Elisheva Biernoff, The Tools Are in Your Hands, 2013. Steel, acrylic latex, magnets, pprox. 15 ft. 8 in. x 24 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Eli Ridgway. Photo: Johnna Arnold.

In a compelling show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, three artists present work that addresses conceptions of and attempts towards utopia. In very different visual languages, Elisheva Biernoff, Oded Hirsch, and Ohad Meromi stage interactive tableaux, captivating videos, and participatory sculptures, putting collective effort at the forefront of the exhibition. The idea of utopia is in constant flux, Work in Progress posits, and it is only through combined visions and repeated attempts at understanding that any true progress can be made.

The exhibition cleverly responds to both ‘progress’ (advancement toward a better state) and ‘in progress’ (in the course of being carried out). Several of the pieces are literally in progress, whether they are documentation of an ongoing film project or an interactive magnetic board open to visitor additions and rearrangements. Most importantly, the artists’ work doesn’t feel forced into what could be a heavy-handed or onerous theme. Biernoff, Hirsch, and Meromi all bring the viewer into their highly personal subject matter through the appealing aesthetics of their work and their ability to make small, individualized experiences take on broader implications.

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