Inquiry: Investigation Through Abstraction
January 26-March 10. 2019 at DAAP Galleries, Univ of Cincinnati, OH
Artists: Liz Ainslie (Brooklyn, NY), Natessa Amin (Philadelphia, PA), Lee Arnold (Brooklyn, NY), David Aylsworth (Houston, TX), Rachel Beach (Brooklyn, NY), Nadine Beauharnois (Philadelphia, PA), Mark Brosseau (Greenville, SC), Martha Clippinger (Durham, NC), Mark Joshua Epstein (Brooklyn, NY), Rubens Ghenov (Knoxville, TN), Clare Grill (Queens, NY), Anna Kunz (Chicago, IL), Meg Lipke (Chatham, NY), Lucy Mink (Contoocook, NH), Nicholas Nyland (Seattle, WA), Alex Paik (Brooklyn, NY), Emil Robinson (Cincinnati, OH), Caroline Santa (Philadelphia, PA), Anne Seidman (Los Angeles, CA), and Kirk Stoller (San Francisco, CA).
This exhibition, curated by Mark Brosseau, brings together twenty artists from across the country who work in a variety of media. Their practices are all based in using abstraction intuitively to explore existing questions and discover new questions. The exhibition features a major representative piece, or group of pieces, by each artist, as well as a wall that includes a smaller painting or work on paper by each person. The paintings, sculptures, works on paper, fibers, video, and photography in the show not only demonstrate the diversity of different explorations, but also reveal areas of both formal and conceptual overlap. Curiosity is the driving force behind the practices represented here. These kinds of investigations and the dialog they can create are now more important than ever, as the norms of communication shift more and more to shouting but never listening – telling but never asking.
Nicholas Nyland’s ceramic sculpture and small, painted study on paper shows a dialogue between media where forms are translated from sculpture into painting and vice-versa. The inherent tension between a form and its surface design means that the work can operate as a sculpture on one hand and a painting on the other. Ceramics has become important to his practice because it offers a medium that expresses an immediacy of touch analogous to the marks in painting and drawing while also connecting to a long historical tradition.
Ornament and surface design become the subjects of works that recall early Modern experiments with color and form. An example of this play with traditional forms or motifs from craft and decorative traditions is Slab Basket (2017), a vessel form composed of rough pieces cut directly from the block of clay. This piece is directly related to earlier paintings by Nyland where geometric shapes were composed in an atmospheric space and treated to a variety of brushwork and painting styles. This kind of sampler approach and painterly concern persist in Slab Basket but are further complicated when translated into three dimensions.
Mirror Study (2017) shows another side of the conversation between painting and sculpture in Nyland’s practice. The image is a study for a potential sculpture, part of a series of ceramic “mirrors” which play with an abstracted standing mirror form and patterning that recalls stained glass. Mirror Study has echos of Matisse who was fond of including his own sculptures or other objects within his paintings. The mirrors are an opportunity to engage a surface that is unstable; is it a fixed object or is it an illusory window, reflecting and projecting an image of its surroundings.