‘Head Space’ by Yamini Nayar

New York-based gallery, Thomas Erben, presents artist Yamini Nayar’s first solo exhibition. In this new body of work, entitled ‘Head Space’, she enables us – through an increase in scale – to more directly inhabit her photographs, documents of temporarily fashioned tabletop sculptures and environments.

A curatorial essay mentions: "A slow-down of the photographic moment is effected through the entirely hand-made nature of her assemblages, which are additionally inscribed with time through a process of continuous reworking. The textures of raw, often discarded materials (plaster, Styrofoam, plastics, fabric, etc.) complemented with the flattening and distancing qualities of photography result in works that are structured, yet highly visceral.

Yamini Nayar, born in 1975, received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2005 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. In her constructions, the artist often uses historical imagery as a point of departure and employs familiar spatial logic to engage levels of recognition, while simultaneously suspending narrative and defying rules of perspective. These tensions, combined with her painterly sense of color and use of light, create an elusive, open-ended quality.

Her ‘Cascading Attica’ presents us with an architectural image fragment, extending into a swirl of unidentifiable matter which wraps around a field seeming simultaneously solid, vaporous, reflective and transparent. Perspective is dislodged – not quite defying gravity, but not on firm ground either – and the exquisitely toxic coloration adds an element of ominence. ‘Attica’ – referring to the Classical Greek region projecting into the Aegean Sea, the 1971 prison riot in upstate New York, and a waterfall in Wyoming – exemplifies her interest in the shifting nature of meaning.

On a formal level, she often intersperses three-dimensionality with decidedly shallow space making both conditions, though factually unfeasible and irresolvable, appear entirely believable. It is as if, rather than working toward compromise, she folds spectrums in half, bringing polarities to a place of coexistence."