AMY NATHAN: Compass Rose Hips
June 8 - August 3, 2024
Artist reception Saturday June 8, 2 - 4 PM
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.”
