Artist N. Dash @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London

N. Dash

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London

April 25 – June 15, 2024

N. Dash 

GP_24, 2024 

Earth, acrylic, cardboard corners, graphite, 

hardware, string, and jute, 

84 × 64½ inches (213.4 × 163.8 cm)

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist N. Dash, inaugurating the gallery’s new location in London’s Mayfair district. The artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery features multi-panel paintings that explore ecologies of resonance among disparate materials. N. Dash’s practice is grounded in and distinguished by bringing together organic substances, manufactured readymade objects, and images resulting from embodied processes. The tactile surfaces of these restrained, luminous works emphasize haptic experience, drawing attention to the subtle yet seismic effects of touch.

N. Dash 

H_24, 2024 

Earth, oil, silkscreen ink, and jute 

66½ × 48 inches (168.9 × 121.9 cm)

N. Dash’s paintings draw on the building blocks of our natural and constructed worlds, including earth and water, jute and cotton, graphite and oil, along with oft-overlooked fabricated items such as architectural insulation and factory-produced cardboard. Across the works in the exhibition, these elements are recombined to elevate the structural, textural, and energetic synergies and tensions among them. A work whose hue resembles patinated copper might comprise Styrofoam insulation, or an image might be silkscreened onto a panel on which earth has been troweled and dried into a cracked, furrowed plane. There are slippages among the many materials, processes, and signifiers that are evoked in these paintings—each held together by careful, spare decisions.

At the core of N. Dash’s work is a daily ritual wherein the artist rubs a small piece of white cotton between finger and thumb until the machine-loomed fibers fray and lose their gridded structure, decomposing into an abject tangle. For the artist, the fabric serves as a recording device on which actions are imprinted, energy is captured, and immaterial forces are stored. The resulting sculptures are colored by a patina of dirt and oils, transformed by the spontaneous movement of the artist’s body. The grid, one of modernism’s paradigmatic forms, is undone again and again in the artist’s hand—by the body, the weather, and the environment. The artist photographs iterations of these sculptures and silkscreens the images onto panels prepared with earth, such that the images undulate according to the earth’s topography. In addition, planes of color are silkscreened, leaving fields of rosette patterns that result from the halftone printing process.

The works’ beveled edges reveal their earthen substrates, allowing them to breathe. In these carved-out margins, the layers of earth, gesso, and jute are rendered visible, exposing the quasi-geologic structure of each panel. This strategy appears differently in a series of works in which strings are embedded in, or excavated from, the earthen grounds, the latter creating fine trenches of negative space, where the materiality of the work is exposed and raw. Ecological concerns course through these paintings with references to human and nonhuman interconnection and intervention. They examine, on an intimate scale, the impact of touch on natural resources, and reckon with the ways in which synthetic materials contain, shape, and merge with the environment. Here, Photoshop can imitate a field of flowers with an algorithmic printing pattern, but a rosette is still a field of ones and zeros. These questions of mimesis, artificiality, and exploitation are at play in these paintings, but subtly so. Through the works on view, nature and byproducts of manufacture are counterposed on vertical stages of earth, uplifting this most fundamental material and source.

LÉVY GORVY DAYAN 

35 Dover Street, London 

www.levygorvydayan.com

N. Dash @ Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York

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

www.caseykaplangallery.com