N. DASH

by bringing together organic substances, manufactured readymade objects, and images resulting fromembodied processes. The tactile surfaces of these restrained, luminous works emphasise haptic experience,drawing attention to the subtle yet seismic effects of touch.

N. Dash’s paintings draw on the building blocks of our natural and constructed worlds, includingearth and water, jute and cotton, graphite and oil, along with oft-overlooked fabricated items such asarchitectural insulation and factory-produced cardboard. Across the works in the exhibition, theseelements are recombined to elevate the structural, textural, and energetic synergies and tensions amongthem. A work whose hue resembles patinated copper might comprise Styrofoam insulation, or an imagemight be silkscreened onto a panel on which earth has been troweled and dried into a cracked, furrowedplane. There are slippages among the many materials, processes, and signifiers that are evoked in thesepaintings—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 betweenfinger and thumb until the machine-loomed fibres fray and lose their gridded structure, decomposinginto 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 coloured by a patina ofdirt and oils, transformed by the spontaneous movement of the artist’s body. The grid, one of modernism’sparadigmatic forms, is undone again and again in the artist’s hand—by the body, the weather, and theenvironment. The artist photographs iterations of these sculptures and silkscreens the images onto panelsprepared with earth, such that the images undulate according to the earth’s topography. In addition, planes of colour are silkscreened, leaving fields of rosette patterns that result from the halftone printingprocess.

The works’ beveled edges reveal their earthen substrates, allowing them to breathe. In these carved-outmargins, the layers of earth, gesso, and jute are rendered visible, exposing the quasi-geologic structureof 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 themateriality of the work is exposed and raw. Ecological concerns course through these paintings withreferences to human and nonhuman interconnection and intervention. They examine, on an intimatescale, the impact of touch on natural resources, and reckon with the ways in which synthetic materialscontain, shape, and merge with the environment. Here, Photoshop can imitate a field of flowers with analgorithmic 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 mostfundamental material and source.

Press release courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan