June 27th, 2016

N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

Artist: N. Dash

Venue: Casey Kaplan, New York

Date: May 3 – June 18, 2016

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Casey Kaplan, New York

Press Release:

In all of N. Dash’s work, there is an emphasis on the importance of touch and the body’s inherent corporeal intellect. Before language there is touch. Often undermined as primitive or merely sensual, touch remains the implicit compass for how we navigate a world where the sensual is inseparable from the perceptual and conceptual. This understanding remains largely unspoken, which indicates that this is a language of an altogether different nature, complicated in its own ways, passed down through our genes, our culture and our technologies.

Dash has always made automatic sculptures out of small pieces of cloth. They are handled until the fibers fray, stain and degrade. What’s left are dirty wads of hugging threads that indirectly document the artist’s everyday, lived experience. Through constant touch and exchange between fingers and fabric, a certain bodily intelligence is indexed, a range of imprinted thought and feeling encrypted. The degraded vestiges are then further translated into an image, arranged in quick succession and photographed. Despite the sculpture’s physical absence, it is precisely only through the image that it reaches its perceptible sculptural form, albeit, only by captured emulsions. These images have been included in a number of Dash’s previous exhibitions.

For N. Dash’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, these images have been imprinted onto an adobe ground, returning them to a more visceral state. Each image, selected from an ever-growing archive, is inverted and silkscreened, shedding its perfect apprehension, furthering its degradation through the pixel, and loosening its bond with the original pieces of fabric. The resulting silkscreens appear to emerge from the adobe ground like fossils partially uncovered, wild in the innate movement they indicate, but still in their actuality. Despite there always being a connective thread between the paintings and photographs, it is in this exhibition that the two strands are physically bound.

We might liken Dash’s paintings to a calculus of intensities, various pressures gauged differently and with precision, like a series of arches held in tension by their keystones. Hinging panels build a subtle environment and their surfaces become a topography of kinesthetic and rhythmic intelligence – line becomes thread, embedded or removed; surface, color, and density all partially reveal their encrypted touch. Lengths of canvas descend in different saturations, pressed and painted, revealing marks through creases and irregularities. Parts inform parts, woven under and over, leaning one on top of another— they are held, bound, touching and resting.

Link: N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

Tags: Casey Kaplan, N. Dash, New York, United States