January 25–March 29, 2008
Curator: Jeffrey Uslip
Artists Space
New York, NY, US
Artists
Kelly Barrie, Justin Beal, Huma Bhabha, Anya Gallaccio, Wade Guyton, Barkley Hendricks, Roni Horn, Igloolik Isuma Productions, Mary Kelly, Charles Long, Michelle Lopez, Andrew Lord, Robert Mapplethorpe, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jack Pierson, Michael Queenland, Marco Rios, Amanda Ross- Ho, Julia Scher, Haim Steinbach, Lisa Tan, Josh Tonsfeldt
Nina In Position presents diverse artistic strategies that complicate the legibility of lack and difference in America. The selected artworks employ Walter Benjamin’s assertion, “To live is to leave traces,” as a platform from which to view and critique the body and its environs. Occupying Artists Space’s main gallery with a series of sculptural and post-sculptural gestures, Nina In Position reveals emancipated forms that, through their inherent deviance, function as “resistance to regimes of the normal.” Nina In Position is an attempt to articulate a new trajectory of sculptural encounters that rebel against the condition described by Benjamin as “Left Melancholia.” The exhibition’s curatorial focus aims to unlock the ways in which artistic exercises, histories, and narratives are re-signified within contemporary visual culture.
Nina celebrates objects borne through experimentation and insight rather than aca- demic metaphor. Here, post-sculptural gestures evade the normalized limitations of sculpture as “objects” and allow sculpture to resonate past traditional constructions, techniques and expectations. The exhibition considers dialogic identities – “Us and Them” – and the ramifications of exclusionary practices that have caused disrupting reverberations throughout the margins in America. It is the aim of Nina to establish a bridge between decades of artistic practice and recalibrate a trajectory of sculptural meaning.
Texts
Jeffrey Uslip. “Nina In Position; Reasons For Secrets. [7:00].“ Exhibition catalogue, 2008 (full version).link / pdf
Reviews
Cotter, Holland. “Review: Nina in Position.” The New York Times. February 15, 2008. Web.link / pdf