Breaking down the title of the exhibition, Geophilia, the prefix refers to “earth”, while the suffix is “loving”. When put together, N. Dash is declaring a love for the earth. Thinking back to modernists like Lucio Fontana or Mark Rothko, each saw the potential for painting to be a portal into infinite space rather than a flattened surface where pigments only rested. Dash, too, is accomplishing something similar through an abstraction that gives an atmospheric glimpse into a monumental beyond. The frequent presence of horizontally-oriented paintings like RCU_25 instantaneously evoke the idea of a horizon line, which in this case, is richly satisfied by the split, diptych arrangement of two vibrant shades of green associative of a verdant landscape.

N. Dash’s exhibition ‘Geophilia’ at the Hill Art Foundation, deftly curated by art historian Suzanne Hudson, engages forcefully with the gallery’s architecture. One has to look carefully: the subtle installation decisions, while easy to miss, emphasize how structural elements in the artist’s work – such as the incorporation of materials ranging from mud to netting – gesture towards the surrounding environment … An ethics of care – ecological and even feminist in nature – is foregrounded in these creative ways of recontextualizing common materials, whether studio detritus, mud or fabric.

An image of indeterminate origin recurs across N. Dash’s paintings — a ghostly landmass, maybe, or a blooming nuclear cloud, or a dust mite under extreme magnification.

It looks more mysterious than what it actually is: scraps of cotton that the artist has worked over in her hand until grimy and frayed, a habit of nervous energy, but also a neat synecdoche of her continuing meditation on bodily awareness, the natural world and the forces that each exert on the other.