Casey Kaplan
ArtForum | N. Dash | STEDELIJK MUSEUM VOOR ACTUELE KUNST (S.M.A.K.)
In “earth,” her first solo museum presentation in Europe, New York–based artist N. Dash continues to find room for innovation within a set of terms she established more than a decade ago. She still uses what could be considered common materials, such as jute, mud, and string, and over time has added more blatantly industrially produced detritus to her inventory: agricultural netting and plastic bottles, for example. But the earth referenced in the exhibition title is a constant, often used as a ground to which the artist sometimes adds pigments drawn from a palette composed of neutral whites, silvers, blacks, and earth tones, with occasional vibrant injections, such as mint green, cerulean, pink, or orange. Or she might silk-screen over the earthen ground, perhaps with an image of one of her diminutive kneaded fabric sculptures, or with the rosette-like shapes that make up the halftone grid used in commercial printing.
Dash composes her works—which are usually Untitled—using discrete units, never disturbing the integrity of a given unit. For example, she might tessellate or layer panels, but she does not compose within them, except by using anti-compositional devices such as chance and symmetry. The closest she comes to composition is when she divides certain panels using string, which often sits under an outer layer of earth or pigment and is sometimes lifted out of the earthen layer to leave an imprint in it. This allows her to subdivide a panel into component parts that can themselves be treated as discrete elements.
Alex Bacon
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