N. Dash, Untitled (2019), via Casey Kaplan
Currently on view at Casey Kaplan’s exhibition space, artist N. Dash presents a selection of new works delving into process, time, material and the act of representation, a series complex silkscreen arrangements that seem to reference space and time, production and material as bound up in an ongoing exchange. The works, spread throughout the gallery space, serve as an intriguing meditation on the concept of production, and how the continued extension and elongation of the productive process can create an ever more expansive range of works.
N. Dash (Installation View), via Casey Kaplan
N. Dash, Untitled (2019), via Casey Kaplan
The works on view are produced using a bed of dirt, silkscreening her images over adobe clay that has been affixed to wood panels. The prints, rendered over the clay, take on the characteristics of the work changing over time. As the clay dries, its cracking surface and porous materiality ultimately twists and changes, turning the original print into something new. It’s a distinct sense of evolutionary process, and of the dense histories of material that the artist seems to prioritize as a sort of ecological undertone in these images. The viewer is presented with works that are bound up in their own engagement with time, breaking down prior relationships in space and density and replacing them with chance operations and new forms. The best laid prints, so to speak, are allowed to go awry, putting a natural, organic imperative at the center of the work.
N. Dash, Untitled (2019), via Casey Kaplan
Accordingly, the artist’s work touches on the idea of both softness and durability, the application of new aesthetic value systems to hard earth, and the attempt at embodying time, of grafting the experience of duration and change over a momentary glance at the image. Rather than merely view the work through the artist’s own aesthetic lens, we are welcomed into an engagement that prioritizes material agency, chemical process, physical flux on its own terms. In a world where the increasingly dire situation of climate change presents its own series of prompts and impacts on the world around us, N. Dash’s invitation to view earth on its own terms makes for a striking counterargument.
The show closes October 26th.
N. Dash (Installation View), via Casey Kaplan
— D. Creahan
Read more:
N. Dash at Casey Kaplan [Exhibition Page]
