What the Current Carries

Etty Yaniv's tall vertical works hang and cascade down a 20' wall like tapestries or monochrome reliefs, built up from paint and textile into forms that suggest at once a chorus and a landscape — cloth that has been lived in, frayed at the edges, carrying river, sediment, and urban patterns. These large, curved, rectangular reliefs seem weighted, almost on the verge of falling. Against that downward pull, smaller pieces of acrylic skin — iridescent green, blue, and orange, organic in shape and texture — are interspersed throughout, bouncing light and pulling upward. The movement up accelerates toward the top, where the pieces turn airy and transparent.

Water imagery runs throughout. Her studio was in DUMBO, Brooklyn, beside the East River — a working waterway lined with old infrastructure and industrial residues, its banks shaped by decades of use — and she photographs and draws utility sites, water against concrete and rock surfaces, layering these images into the surface.

For this exhibition at the McDonough, Yaniv turned to the Mahoning River Valley — what it made, what it lost, and what it is becoming. She worked materials from that history into the pieces: wire mesh and steel wool, echoing the valley's steel past, pressed into fabric alongside the East River images. Two rivers meet in the work, one beside her studio and one around this gallery — different places, each marked by heavy use and industrial past. The same question runs through both: what remains in a place that has been used hard and is now finding a new shape? The answer is still forming.