Exhibited Artwork

Paper is an artifact of permanence and impermanence. It records, erases, endures - layered with traces of human touch. Illya Goldman Gubin‘s installation of four industrial paper reels explores this paradox, transforming an everyday material into a vessel of perception. These massive rolls, stripped of their conventional function, become landscapes of possibility - dynamic surfaces that invite interaction, waiting to be marked, torn, and carried away. Unlike a framed image or concrete idea, paper in this form resists fixed meaning. What is typically weightless now carries a profound gravity. Their sheer mass commands attention - not through embellishment, but through raw, unyielding presence, shaping experience and evoking permanence, restraint, and contemplation. In their stillness, the rolls exist as the sole presence in the space, stripped of excess and distraction. Goldman Gubin allows the viewer to confront the material directly, offering a distilled moment where paper is no longer a mere background element, but rather a subject to be experienced in its own right. Yet these rolls are more than material. They hold something unseen, something waiting. Embedded within their fibers, hidden between layers, lie molecules that exist outside of memory - pure, abstract, unclaimed by past experience. Siseel Tolaas introduces the olfactory dimension, hacking fragrance by stripping it from the bottle, from commercial storytelling, and embedding it instead within the very structure of the paper itself. Smell does not exist in the way an image does. It cannot be captured, framed, or observed from a distance. It must be experienced - it penetrates, surrounds, lingers. It is immediate, visceral, inseparable from emotion. A single smell can resurrect forgotten moments, evoke entire landscapes, and forge indelible connections. And yet, the molecules infused into these papers are abstract, untethered from prior associations. They are blank slates, waiting to become memory. Interaction with this installation occurs through touch - a tear, a fragment taken. This small act shifts the paper from passive object to active agent of memory-making. A visitor takes a piece, carrying with them not just material, but potential - each infused fragment placed into an aluminum lab flask, a familiar scientific vessel repurposed to preserve the moment until it is deliberately revived. When the molecule is finally released, it imprints a memory, forging a link between scent, time, and experience. What was once industrial paper, stripped of its original function, now holds something more. It is no longer for writing, wrapping, or packing - it is a tool for the unseen, a carrier of ephemeral moments, a medium for lived experience. Here, paper and scent converge. Not as separate elements, but as a single, unified experience - one that is not observed, but embodied.