N. Dash
Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York
May 3 - June 18, 2016
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.
N. 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 Casey Kaplan 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 N. 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.
An essay on the work by Michael Taussig, titled Farewell Before Entering the Void, is currently available through the gallery, to be included in an upcoming publication.
N. DASH (b. 1980, Miami Beach) earned a BA from New York University in 2003 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2010. In recent years, N. Dash has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014-2015) and White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2013). The artist has recently been included in group exhibitions such as the Jewish Museum, New York (2015); Strozzina Centre for Contemporary Culture (2015); Pier 54 High Line, New York (2014); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2014); Maxxi Museum, Rome (2014); Columbus College of Art and Design, Ohio (2013); and Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Los Angeles (2013).
CASEY KAPLAN
121 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001
