Untitled, 2018

The creative practice of N. Dash is a haptic manifestation of lived experience and bodily intelligence through material. Working with linen and paper, adobe and jute, obsessive reworkings give physical form to the intangible and the imagined.The presentation includes several of N. Dash’s ‘Commuters’ as well as new paintings. The ‘Commuter Works’ are made during the artist’s daily commute from home to studio and elsewhere. While in transit, a piece of paper is repeatedly touched, creased, and folded until the material’s strength abates. After the paper has been extensively handled, it is then coated in graphite or pigment to ‘seal’ the touch. That is, they are not so much works on paper as works with paper. The paintings use adobe as their often-monochromatic ground. Earth is excavated from the New Mexico high desert and shipped to her New York studio to be rendered into a muddy plaster. The works are constructed of multiple components, clad in canvas and deposits of pigment. Individual parts are variously arranged, indicating iterative possibilities while shifting the earth from the horizontal plane upon which we stand to the vertical register of the wall, the field of vision.

N. Dash's (born 1980 in Miami) work emphasizes the primacy of touch, opening up forms of communication that extend beyond the parameters of language. Each sculpture is interrelated, networked, and unfolds into the next. She lives and works in New York and New Mexico.