Evolutionary theories, scientific research of symbiotic phenomena in nature, and self-destructing mechanisms — these are only some of the research fields from which Nivi Alroy draws her inspiration. Her poetic, formal lexicon is comprised of a blend of discourses and far-removed worlds: metaphors from the microbial world acquire formal manifestation in urban systems, and are decoded in feminist contexts; mechanisms of chemical communication, DNA strands, cell communities, and organic systems undergo processes of mediation, formalization, projection, and abstraction. These are translated into intricate sculptures and images pertaining to dependence and mutuality, calling to mind types of broken machines, fungi, jellyfish, and billowing structures which seem to have collapsed into particles that multiply out of bodies and are fused into domestic items, according to their own inner logic.

Alroy presents a new selection of works representing the diverse media in which she operates: sculpture and installation, drawing and animation. The three motifs which come together in most of her works are conspicuous in the current exhibition: furniture parts, architectural elements, and a bubbling fluid made of white porcelain, ostensibly fusing and infusing these elements into one another, reinforcing the sense of leakage and flow. The architectural organism engendered by these elements — like a melting pot which spawns organic sculptural forms reminiscent of aerial roots or weaves of surging growth in a process of constant transformation — defies the laws of nature and does not obey the force of gravity or any prevalent division between interior and exterior.

In Wave Land (2010-2011), for instance, the object cascade appears to grow from the armchair upwards, as if the force of gravity were applied in reverse, whereas the structure wave bound with electric wires and the cables trailing from the Medusa’s body in Medusa Gigantea (2010-2011) drip onto the intimate private space of the armchair, crossing its boundaries. All types of organization and every form of order or fixation have been totally breached here. The city as a habitation machine and the domestic receptacles are under constant earthquake. Threatened by the invasive energy of perpetual destruction, subsequent to their disintegration they seem to reunite by virtue of some magnetic force, acquiring a life of their own, transforming into living creatures which follow some latent regularity.

This sense of constant transformation is heightened in the animated piece Dripping City (2011). Combining a video projection with a drawing executed directly on the wall, it features an urban landscape deconstructed into its constituent elements—asbestos roofs, solar water heaters, windows, shutters, and other parts—oozing from a building’s rooftop into a basin-like container, only to climb back in an endless loop. The sketchily drawn handwriting and the movement embodied in the animation seem to soften the apocalyptic effect, lending the elusive scene a vein of poetic humor.

Alroy’s works are characterized by compression, surplus, obsession, and a penchant for detail. This is especially evident in the dense sections of her sculptural works which evoke phenomena of Outsider laboriousness—structures made of millions of matches or ships constructed from ice-pop sticks. In the “Hotel Utopia-Dystopia,” a special issue of Studio art magazine (1998: 89) edited by Meir Agassi, such works were defined as “an intricate trap of images that flood the paper with a conflicted blend of dream and reality.” Alroy’s image flood is indeed wholly conscious of itself; still, one cannot avoid thinking of the Outsider syntax as a type of cultural anchor, supplemented here by high dosages of grotesqueness, a manipulation of scale, constant transformation, humor, absurd, and a deflection of the functionality of familiar objects—qualities ordinarily associated in art history with the Surrealistic syntax.

The paradoxical concept behind symbiotic phenomena seems to have a special appeal to Alroy. The engagement with mutual dependency is especially discernible in Chacun Pour Soi (After Philippe Rousseau) (2010-2011) created after Rousseau’s 1864 painting by that name. The painting endearingly depicts a bitch nursing her puppies while burrowing through a basket overflowing with plates and cutlery stained with food leftovers. In Alroy’s sculptural version, all the scale systems seem to have gone awry to the point of total collapse: the puppy suckles from the porcelain nipple of a bitch whose head is stuck inside a cement bag lying in a deserted urban setting, and the food leftovers are replaced by the miniaturized traces of a city ostensibly culled and piled after some ecological catastrophe or destruction. The fact that the sculpture was created during the artist’s pregnancy conceals additional meanings involving systems of control, containment and survival, mother-child relations, nourishment and compassion, and may allude to the physical, wild, and beastly aspects of woman-nature relations.

The distortion of interior-exterior relations perceptible in all of Alroy’s works may also be read in the spirit of the feminist discourse: the engagement with the domestic sphere, with the habitation environment which is supposed to shelter the body, yet falls apart, becoming invaded and invading, may be construed as a symbolical disruption of order which threatens to dissolve the soothing division of inside from outside. Similarly, the city’s vestiges dripping like liquid waste — an expression of excess and redundancy — may embody the affinity between processes of removal of bodily waste, and different levels of social order and domestication. This fluid state of collapse of internal and external systems attests that the distinction between the private space (the body/armchair) and the public space (the house/city) is no longer valid. The boundaries have collapsed and blended as in a tsunami—the body, the home, and the city have become elements in an imaginary food chain abiding by hidden natural laws.