N. Dash, Nina Canell

Stockholm, August 19, 2021 - September 25, 2021

The exhibition brings together two voices into a shared space, accentuating aspects they might have in common, as well as those that set them apart. Spread across three rooms, the works speak in the resonant spaces between them, articulating something that is not fully or properly either of the two. The works of N. Dash and Nina Canell occupy different spatial planes, both employing various kinds of building material, or used material found in built environments. The works negotiate the cracks and seams that occur in the gallery – between and betwixt states of matter and non-human agents – drawing attention to the metaxic meanderings that surface when materials meet. As such, not only is there a generative friction within the pairing of each artist’s materials as they rub off of each other, but also an inherent tension within the individual works themselves. Dash’s screenprints of worn fabric sculptures appear as pressure knots, indexes of the space between thumb and index finger; a work carried in the pocket and made in the world. Coincidentally, the diagrammatic verticals of Canell appear to consist of the small things that end up in pockets, or fall out when emptying denims long left unattended.

Both practices and their objects of residual energetics access a broader concern with land and its scape. Adobe mud, pressed and left to dry in semi-emblematic arrangements, point to a territorial gridding of almost cartographic blocks and planes, agricultural strokes. Or perhaps less agricultural in how it references the absence of water, a parched soil horizon. Using string to create this muddy geometry also ties in neatly with Canell’s use of string, laces or floss, in order to send asymmetrical wavelengths through her shaky sweepings, oft useless leftovers of the used up. The destabilising nature of these quotidian scraps point to a tension that slices through the rooms like fault lines, and with the addition of Canell’s basalt Subwoofs, it is hard not to consider the geological aspects of Dash’s choice of materials further. We could talk about value and resources, anthropogenic cuts. Between our built environment and the resources that build it there is something malleable: the cultivation of awareness between them, the attitudes that determine whether they connect or collide, in what has turned into a head-on confrontation. It’s as if we can sum up the parts of this two-person exhibition with what we hear when we enter the space: the tap-tap-tapping resonance of a golden tooth as it frenetically head-butts a quartz pebble.

Robin Watkins, July 2021

Nina Canell was born 1979 in Växjö, went to art school in Dublin, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Her solo exhibitions include Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2019); S.M.A.K (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst), Ghent (2018); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2018); The Artist’s Institute, New York (2017); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2017); Arko Art Center, Seoul (2016); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2014); Camden Arts Centre, London (2014); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2012), and Fridericianum, Kassel (2011). Her group shows include the Venice, Sydney, Lyon, Gwangju, and Liverpool biennials; exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; the ICA, London; Guggenheim, Bilbao, and Manifesta 7, Trentino – South Tyrol. Nina Canell frequently collaborates with Robin Watkins on artist’s books and publications.

N. Dash was born in 1980 and lives and works in New York and New Mexico. Dash has mounted solo exhibitions at: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Casey Kaplan, New York; Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp; and Galerie Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin. Selected group exhibitions include: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dallas Museum of Art; The Flag Art Foundation, New York; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; American University Museum, Washington, D.C., Birmingham Museum of Art; , Los Angeles; Jewish Museum, New York; Les Brasseurs Art Contemporain, Liège; MAXXI Museum, Rome; and Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. Dash’s work is included in the public collections of major institutions such as: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A new monograph will be available in September.