Detail: ” s/plit,” Jenene Nagy, 2008, Site-specific installation with latex paint, drywall, wood, and neon. Courtesy of the artist.
Lit. Like a bulb. Or a book. Or a class about a book. Split like a seam or a house come under the ministrations of one Gordon Matta-Clark. Split, rent from ordinary circumstances. Spit or sit. It. Multifaceted like a cut gem, the word “split” when rent with a well-placed slash, all the more deliciously ambiguous. “s/plit” is Portland-based artist Jenene Nagy’s installation as part of the Portland Art Museum’s APEX series that brings dynamic regional artists space into the institution to Make Something Happen. Kudos, NW Curator, Jennifer Gately.
s/plit closes after tomorrow (June 22). Here’s why you need to go see it if you haven’t already been thrice.
Sited and Sited
s/plit fully engages the space in a way that no other APEX artist has. It’s not an installation series, so fine, but this is exciting and not to be missed. What do you mean “engages the space”? Nagy’s work dynamically draws you in, spins you around, and draws your gaze upward and over there. (all the more remarkable as this isn’t done with image, with color and color, it’s simply form (purple) enhanced with the briefest rhythmic frosting of neon light.) Eyes swept up and over your right shoulder, you notice an architectural feature, a cutout high in the wall above a doorway, that you have never noticed before. In this way, like good and truly site specific art, s/plit asks us to re-see a space. It’s the same (critical) function a small child performs on an urban walkabout, teaching us to re-see spaces, features, objects we have neglected to notice, ceased to see. Not coincidentally, the gallery Nagy runs with Josh Smith, Tilt, has shown exemplary work of this nature, esp. that of Alison Owen.
Your Hem Is Showing
The piece starts on the wall, as purple painted jagged form, grows off the wall and you notice the materials at work: the 2 x 4’s holding up panels that continue the wall-painted forms out into the space. You notice the transparency, the deliberate lack of sleight of hand, the methods of the panels’ suspension are here for all to see. And s/plit starts to talk about the walls of this site here, walls we take for granted in their paint over drywall over 2 x 4 studs, 16″ on center, say, foregrounding the space and its containment in interesting ways.
And were your experience of the work to stop here, it would be sufficient. But there’s a bit more, if you’d care to dig. Nagy is thinking about pre-fab American subdivision architecture, advertising billboards, stage props. The purple Nagy chose is a remembered shade, a sunset I think it was. Or see beyond walls, if you are the type whose mind can’t avoid looking at form as representing, and see horizon lines and reductionist landscapes, particularly with Nagy’s new use of glimmers of angular neon which could be reflections, water or glass. It’s a piece that perfectly balances appeals to intellect and eye.
Jeanene Nagy’s “s/plit” is located in the Wintercross Family Foundation Gallery, 4th floor, Center for Northwest Art, Hoffman Wing of the Portland Art Museum (1219 SW Park).
See also:
Nagy has work at upcoming shows in Brooklyn and Berlin: Au Courant at Dam, Stuhltrager in Brooklyn and at Knowable Terrains at Takt kunstprojektraum in Berlin.
“Slip,” Jenene Nagy, 2008. Latex paint and paper, 97”x14”.
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