n. dash exhibits at the aldrich contemporary art museum

the aldrich contemporary art museum in connecticut announces a solo exhibition devoted to a new body of work by n. dash, to be the artist’s first solo museum exhibition on the east coast of the united states. dash’s work spans painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography, and employs both natural and manmade materials, including pigments, adobe/mud, fabric, string, styrofoam, and found objects. across these media, the artist’s interests lie both in recording the sensory capacities of touch and revealing typically unobserved conduits of energy: ecological, architectural, and corporeal. the works unfold through what dash terms a ‘bifocal’ approach where two minds, under the influence of physical and extrasensory influences are communing visions both nearby and remote.

the exhibition will be on view until september 15, 2019.

all images courtesy the artist and casey kaplan, new york
image by jason wyche

displayed at the aldrich contemporary art museum, one of the essential components and an integral material agent in dash’s work is ‘fabric sculptures.’ these are small forms made by continually rubbing pieces of white cotton fabric between the fingers until they dissolve into whorls of thread. imbued with a patina of oil and dirt and the labor of continual movement — unseen but still palpable within the fibers — the sculptures embody a preverbal, visceral, and intuitive system of communication. distressed and abject, these forms are distilled through archival documentation and subsequently preserved and re-presented as photographs or silk-screened images incorporated into paintings. activities that seek to distance the sculptures from their original physical iteration and to magnify their diminutive size to likenesses the scale of the human body and beyond.

image by jason wyche

the paintings often feature troweled-on-fields of adobe — earth transposed from the landscape — that is gathered from the high desert and shipped to the artist’s studio. this material develops skin-like puckers and furrows as it dries, creating surfaces that suggest a dermal membrane that protects, insulates, and breathes, qualities present both in the body’s protective layer and vernacular architecture. serial lengths of string are frequently embedded into the adobe and then partially removed, leaving thin channels that evoke both the terrestrial meridians that geographers impose on the earth for navigational purposes and the corporeal meridians that govern the flow of qi or energy through the human body.

image by jason wyche