Historically, art material inventories documented artists’ resources, commissions, and contracts. Proprietary recipes were rather more hidden, the better to preserve their alchemical aura, or at least the possibility to imagine that the maker had access to powerful trade secrets. Contemporary checklists and exhibition didactics have preserved and standardized this descriptive impulse. A typical wall label tidily shares what makes up the physical object on view. This institutional convention presumes that such a list is meaningful to the viewer irrespective of whether evidence of the process of making remains visible in the art. (Elsewhere, such material metadata has a different use value: for insurance and shipping, and ultimately conservation, attribution, and appraisal.) What is further communicated—beyond the enumeration of materials and the specific meanings associated with, say, enamel or ink—is the principle of transparency.
In N. Dash’s work, materials bear traces of having been touched or structured by rituals and pragmatics of handling. Paper has been folded and refolded; pieces of cotton have been rubbed into frayed, agentive sculptures; paintings are undergirded with earth. In addition to the acrylic and oil paints and ink, one here finds nitrile gloves, cardboard corners, and Styrofoam—elements that have effectively become studio readymades, referring back to the processes that made the artworks in the first place. Organic materials—earth, rock, the literal ground that all artworks ultimately rest on—interrupt this hardware-store catalog. Together, they create a kind of therianthrope, pointing to symbiotic coexistence.
What follows is a set of working definitions of the materials that N. Dash uses. These entries establish context for the artist’s materials and point beyond themselves, like analog hyperlinks. Parsed separately, they should nevertheless be thought in contextual combination. All materials are relational.
Historically, art material inventories documented artists’ resources, commissions, and contracts. Proprietary recipes were rather more hidden, the better to preserve their alchemical aura, or at least the possibility to imagine that the maker had access to powerful trade secrets. Contemporary checklists and exhibition didactics have preserved and standardized this descriptive impulse. A typical wall label tidily shares what makes up the physical object on view. This institutional convention presumes that such a list is meaningful to the viewer irrespective of whether evidence of the process of making remains visible in the art. (Elsewhere, such material metadata has a different use value: for insurance and shipping, and ultimately conservation, attribution, and appraisal.) What is further communicated—beyond the enumeration of materials and the specific meanings associated with, say, enamel or ink—is the principle of transparency.
In N. Dash’s work, materials bear traces of having been touched or structured by rituals and pragmatics of handling. Paper has been folded and refolded; pieces of cotton have been rubbed into frayed, agentive sculptures; paintings are undergirded with earth. In addition to the acrylic and oil paints and ink, one here finds nitrile gloves, cardboard corners, and Styrofoam—elements that have effectively become studio readymades, referring back to the processes that made the artworks in the first place. Organic materials—earth, rock, the literal ground that all artworks ultimately rest on—interrupt this hardware-store catalog. Together, they create a kind of therianthrope, pointing to symbiotic coexistence.
What follows is a set of working definitions of the materials that N. Dash uses. These entries establish context for the artist’s materials and point beyond themselves, like analog hyperlinks. Parsed separately, they should nevertheless be thought in contextual combination. All materials are relational.
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