AMY NATHAN: Compass Rose Hips

June 8 - September 7, 2024
Artist reception Saturday June 8, 2 - 4 PM

Inquire | Installation Images


CULT Aimee Friberg is excited to announce Compass Rose Hips, Amy Nathan’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, opening on Saturday, June 8 at CULT Bureau (482-D 49th Street) and running through August 3, 2024, with an artist reception on Saturday, June 8 from 2 - 4 PM.

For this new body of work, including drawings and sculpture, Nathan conjures a garden, continuing her engagement with the metamorphosis of the female body and her exploration of the porous relationship between object, image, and text. Nathan’s process is part archivist, part alchemist, intermixed with experimentation and play. In her excavation of the everyday, Nathan emphasizes the importance of her daily studio habits of photographing her surrounding world, drawing and writing in her sketchbook, and cataloging resonating words and poems from other artists and writers. Texts by touchstone artists Louise Bourgeois and Ree Morton, and writers Louis Glück, Susan Stewart, Sheila Heti, and Kay Ryan fertilized the notation-like drawings that led to the realized works in this exhibition. This recording allows the accumulation to percolate as the relationships reveal themselves. She says:

“Orienting myself, I resist wrapping it up. Better the souvenirs from the clutter drawer: smear of ripe fruit, stray glove, doily, hourglass, bookmark, handful of petals. I soften my gaze and allow a fig or a bit of lace to be a hologram for a sharp elbow and a memory of a garden.”

Nathan’s garden is built of form, sustenance, fragrance, and hydration. In this current body of work, her recurring theme of metamorphosis unfolds as theatrical floriculture, and a place for the body to ruminate on change. The folklorically fabled dogwood is lingered over, its quatrefoil inflorescence a form that includes an internal aperture and an external undulation. These petals are emphasized through repetition and move throughout the exhibition, translated in versatile form–from bronze, to wood, to watercolor–ultimately framing, fragmenting, and flexing. Nathan relates the dogwood’s heraldry to the compass or the four winds, and notes its usefulness, such as its bark as a bulwark against fire and as a medicinal healer. Nathan also returns to her depiction of the fig, its pointed swell echoing a water droplet and evoking deep history–the human connection to hospitality, sweetness, sensuality, which she casts in bronze and repeats many times, creating a portal of joined talismans in To see what is in motion you must move, 2024.

There is a doubling running throughout–objects that Nathan collects appear as themselves in one instance, and act as catalysts to build from in the next. For instance, a crocheted doily from her mother-in-law’s house is clasped between a translucent resin handprint and a bronze fig leaf in Shaking, 2024. Its lacy interlocking shapes are echoed in the room divider titled Tangle like a bramble, like a rose, 2024. Nathan notes that in her intention to codify a way to draw a dogwood blossom, the outer edge of each petal reads like a bracket. Typographically, brackets establish limits and assign order. The artist notes that in the drawings and note-taking in her sketchbook, she uses a single bracket to encompass ideas and point forward to her next thought. Incidentally, etymologically, ‘bracket’ contains ‘crochet,’ a double support in wood, also a stitch in cloth. Which is to say that words and images contain ghosts in their peripheral vision, and are perhaps still pointing us to metaphorical relationships between the body and the processes we use to enclose, encapsulate and clothe it.

In the dusk-lit diptych Volta, 2024, Nathan depicts an arc of floating Brugmansia on a gridded ombre-washed background from sunset tones to a deep-night indigo hue. These ‘angel’s trumpets’ swaying bells emit a deeply sweet scent to draw in pollinating moths at night, an intoxicating aroma that while alluring for humans alike, can be highly poisonous. This motion of a trumpet’s form: funneling in while pushing out, is akin to the circular movement of a fountain, a regular feature in a garden or park. For the sculpture The tipping up from flat was gradual, you must assume, 2024, Nathan has fabricated a vertical fountain-like form of resin, marble, plexiglass, and crystal depicting an inverted head—a recurring cartoon self-portrait—whose balancing act has gone awry: the water vessel upended and spilling forth. Here, the cycling water of a fountain suggests the ever-changing composition of a woman’s body through the hormonal shifts of puberty, pregnancy, and menopause. Ripples form as the water hits the surface, creating a hieroglyph of liquid, movement and time.

CULT Bureau is located in the pedestrian walk-ways of Oakland’s Temescal Alley and is open by appointment. To schedule, contact the gallery at info@cultexhibitions.com or visit www.cultexhibitions.com.

Amy Nathan is an artist working in sculpture, painting and installation; her practice asks questions about how meaning can be expressed through visual languages. Nathan’s work is guided by ideas such as the gendered nature of politics and power, classical mythology and contemporary literature, and the body’s visceral reaction to its environment. Her work has been exhibited at CULT Aimee Friberg, Headlands Center for the Arts, /room/, Saint Joseph’s Arts Society, AORA London, Traywick Contemporary, Root Division, Facebook, and the International Sculpture Center. Nathan’s work has appeared in Artforum, Art Maze Magazine, New American Paintings, Sculpture Magazine, and was featured with Juxtapoz. She holds an MFA from Mills College and was a Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts. Her 2019 solo exhibition was reviewed as a “Critic’s Pick” in Artforum, in which Emily Wilson noted, “Though their references are as wide-ranging as their forms, Nathan’s works exhibit a playful hand adept at using symbols to tell some of the oldest but still urgent stories of human relations.”

\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\
\

Upcoming

NICKI GREEN: Eye of the Fountain
September 6 - November 16, 2024

Current

AMY NATHAN: Compass Rose Hips
June 8 - September 7, 2024

Past

RUXUE ZHANG: Alien Life
May 1 - July 13, 2024

CULT TURNS 10
10 Year Anniversary Exhibition
January 18 - March 2, 2024

TERRI LOEWENTHAL
Mountain Goat Mountain

September 15 – November 18, 2023

Time is a Tangled Web: Mary Fernando Conrad, Sophronia Cook, Cross Lypka, Tyler Cross, Zhivago Duncan, Jean Isamu Nagai, Rachel Kaye, Ruth Charlotte Kneass at CULT Bureau, Oakland
September 28 - December 16, 2023

Last Light: Luz Carabaño, Sophronia Cook, Cross Lypka, and Aidan Koch
June 23 - August 26, 2023

ECHO ECHO: Rachel Bridges and Ivan Bridges at CULT Bureau, Oakland
March 2 - August 5, 2023

RHONDA HOLBERTON: Two Handfuls Of Silver Dust
April 27 - June 17, 2023

LEGACY: Binta Ayofemi, Adrian L. Burrell, Rachel Bridges, Ivan Bridges, Masako Miki, and Jean Isamu Nagai
January 18 - April 1, 2023

ZHIVAGO DUNCAN: Measuring Consciousness
September 15 - December 10, 2022

CULT Bureau: Gaze Interrupted
September 17 - November 19, 2022

AMY NATHAN: Slipknot Loophole
May 14 - August 26, 2022

REBEKAH GOLDSTEIN: Welcome Home Stranger
March 19 - May 7, 2022

Sapiens / Stories at CULT Bureau
November 10, 2021 - April 30, 2022

Physics & Fiction
January 20 - March 12, 2022

CHRIS FALLON: Irresistible Deception
October 15 - December 18, 2021

Sapiens / Stories on 8-Bridges
October 7 - November 3, 2021

MASAKO MIKI: New Mythologies
June 16 - October 12, 2021

Tales of Metamorphosis: Rebekah Goldstein, James Perkins, and Amy Nathan
June 3 - 30, 2021

Janus II - CULT's 7 Year Anniversary Exhibition
April 9 - May 20, 2021

TROY CHEW: Yadadamean
October 17 - December 12, 2020

We’re all in this together
August 14 - October 10, 2020

Beyond Words
June 26 - August 29, 2020

Ritual of Succession
January 10 - March 28, 2020

Record of Succession at fused space
January 13 - March 27, 2020

AMY NATHAN: Glyph Slipper
September 13 - December 7, 2019

FEMALE TROUBLE 2
June 28 - August 3, 2019

RUXUE ZHANG
April 20 - June 15, 2019

MASAKO MIKI: Shapeshifters
January 12 - March 23, 2019

JASKO BEGOVIC (SKO HABIBI): HUMAN_E.T.
November 30 - December 14, 2019

REBEKAH GOLDSTEIN: See You On The Flipside
September 8 - November 25, 2018

FEMALE TROUBLE
June 9 - July 28, 2018

TERRI LOEWENTHAL: Psychscapes
March 2 - May 19, 2018

VECINOS
October 27, 2017 - January 20, 2018

RHONDA HOLBERTON: Still Life
January 10 – March 4, 2017

REBEKAH GOLDSTEIN: Release Me
October 21 - December 10, 2016

NO SHOW MUSEUM: Yves Klein, Maria Eichhorn, Daniel Knorr, Etc.
One Night Only: Monday, October 17, 2016

DESIRÉE HOLMAN: Selected Works
September 17 - October 8, 2016

SHE MOONAGE DAYDREAM:
Facundo Argañaraz, Leah Guadagnoli, Desirée Holman, Kara Joslyn, Max Maslansky, Liz Robb, Tamra Seal, Emily Weiner, & Cate White

July 16 - August 20, 2016

PABLO DÁVILA: Ladies & Gentlemen,
We Are Floating In Space

May 13 - July 9, 2016

MASAKO MIKI: Conversations with Fox, Feather, and Ghost
March 4 - April 30, 2016

SUZY POLING: Total Internal Reflection
January 15 - February 27, 2016

DAN GLUIBIZZI: You Don’t Have to be Alone Tonight
November 6 – December 19, 2015

FRANCESCO IGORY DEIANA: Haptic Render
September 11- October 31, 2015

SEXXXITECTURE: Daniel Gerwin, Rebekah Goldstein, Roman Liška, Max Maslansky, May Wilson & Jake Ziemann
July 1 - August 1, 2015

ADAM SORENSEN: In Situ
May 1 - June 27, 2015

KLARA KÄLLSTRÖM & THOBIAS FÄLDT: Village / High Hills
February 27 - April 25, 2015

PRINCE RAMA: How To Live Forever
January 25 – February 21, 2015

JOSEPH DUMBACHER & JOHN DUMBACHER: Divert (Out of Line)
November 7, 2014 – January 16, 2015

REBEKAH GOLDSTEIN: Passenger
September 12 – November 1, 2014

A PATTERN LANGUAGE: Michelle Grabner, Angie Wilson & Lena Wolff
June 20 - July 19, 2014

MICHELLE BLADE: Gathering Into Being
April 25th – June 7th, 2014

MIGUEL ARZABE: /*Reject Algorithms*/
March 7 – April 19, 2014

JACQUELINE KIYOMI GORDON: Drawings
March 7 – April 19, 2014

FRITZ CHESNUT: Purr Valley
& Rhonda Holberton

January 10 - February 22, 2014

UNSEEN: Miya Ando, Miguel Arzabe, Chris Duncan, Klea Mckenna & Dean Smith
November 10 - December 21, 2013

Past Off-Site Exhibitions

RHONDA HOLBERTON: Still Life 2
April 7 - May 26, 2018

LAS COSAS QUE PINTAN / PAINTING IN AN EXPANSIVE FIELD
Works by Miguel Arzabe & Juan Sorrentino

April 9 – May 17, 2015

EBB: Gina Borg and Chris Russell at Loczi Design
December 10, 2014