Hyphen Curated by Ali Banisadr
September 12 - Oc tober 16, 2019
Natessa Amin
All artwork Š Mo Kong unless otherwise noted. Catalogue design by Shona Masarin-Hurst. 1
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
STAFF
ADVISORY COUNCIL
Kate Buchanan
Executive Director
Katie Cercone
Theodore S. Berger Vernon Church Marcy Cohen Blake Horn
Thomas K.Y. Hsu
Steffani Jemison John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan
Lionel Leventhal Rachel Maniatis
Christen Martosella Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen Lilly Wei
Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus
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Corina Larkin
Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director
Lilly Hern-Fondation Programs Manager Josephine Heston
Programs Associate
Polly Apfelbaum Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper
Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney
Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass
Sharon Lockhart Juan Sรกnchez Lilly Wei
Andrea Zittel
Irving Sandler (in memoriam)
CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources. CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines. This exhibition is a winning selection from the 2018-19 Open Call for Solo Exhibitions. The proposal was unanimously selected by a jury comprised of panelists Andrianna Campbell, art historian; Steffani Jemison, artist; and Ali Banisadr, artist. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition. We are honored to work with Ali Banisadr as the curator-mentor to Natessa Amin.
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Hyphen Natessa Amin
I was born and raised in Pennsylvania in an IndianAmerican family. I grew up navigating the complex relationships that were formed through the combination of contrasting cultures and religions. My work is a reflection on this unique American experience and confronts the hybrid nature of identity through the layering of images and processes while addressing our desire to share experience. These ideas are investigated through processes that allude to the notion of creation and destruction as it relates to materiality, the self, and nature. I activate memories and contemplate autobiographical events and family history through (the process of) making. The paintings I make contain interactions of color, pattern, textures, and symbols inspired by designs used in Indian and African textiles, Indian palaces and garden design, and Pennsylvania Dutch craft, which manifest
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ideas ranging from postcolonial histories, personal narrative, ornamentation, and the mystical languages of abstract Tantra painting. A range of materials are used throughout the works: pigments and dyes are sprinkled and absorbed into the grounds, granulated glass particles are dragged across the surfaces, drawing lines are made with embroidery thread that hugs the curves of the forms that emerge, silver leaf is applied onto raised areas of paint. My desires to shield and protect, to nourish and feed, give life to an embryonic system of works that move between painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Through installation, I aim to create worlds of tactile immediacy that dismantle hierarchy for the viewer in the hope of forming new connections from one piece to the next. Through this series of combinations and interchanging visualizations, I search for moments of convergence as I negotiate and reconcile what it means to be hybrid.
Natessa Amin (b. 1987, Easton, PA) is a visual artist based in Philadelphia. Amin earned her BFA in Painting from Boston University (2010) and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2015). She is the co-director of FJORD Gallery in Philadelphia and a full-time faculty member at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. Amin’s solo and two-person exhibitions include Dancing on the Water Tank at the Philip & Muriel Berman Museum of Art (2017); Past is a Place at the HUB Gallery at Moravian College (2016); We Can’t Say What We’ve Seen at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles (2018); and a scheduled exhibition (October 2019) at Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn. She has shown work in group exhibitions at Hangar H18 Gallery, Brussels; Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn; Distillery Gallery, Boston; Benaco Arte, Sirmione, Italy; and at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Pilot Projects, and CFEVA in Philadelphia.
Amin has been awarded residencies at the Fabric Workshop and Museum (2016), Wassaic Project (2017), Lacawac Sanctuary & Biological Field Station (2018), and the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts (2019). The artist acknowledges the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for their support towards this exhibition.
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Ali Banisadr Curator-Mentor
On Natessa Amin
When I first encountered Natessa Amin’s work I immediately thought of her as a shaman. Through her practice, she taps into a deep place within herself and accesses something that is very true to her core. Her work hovers between many histories, cultures, and art movements. She has a unique ability to combine all of these elements in an effortless way. The works are both ancient and contemporary at the same time — mythological symbols, protective imagery, Indian Miniatures, African quilts, Native American ledger drawings, Hilma af Klint, Franz West, Chris Ofili, and Rirkrit Tiravanija all come to mind. Amin possesses a skilled ability to use many different materials to convey her vision while celebrating the hybridity of her own identity. In her exhibition, titled Hyphen, at CUE Art Foundation in New York, she uses painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation to show her diverse range of materials within each work containing infinite variety.
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The work of Ali Banisadr (b. 1976, Tehran, Iran) demonstrates a careful balancing act between chaos and composure, and abstract and figurative painting and drawing. His complex, expansive paintings are rich with figurative allusions rooted in autobiographical narratives, sonic recollection, invented stories, world history, collective memory, and mythology. He obtained his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from New York Academy of Art. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Ali Banisadr’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Het Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands; Gemäldegalerie, Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna; and MOCA Jacksonville in Florida; along with group exhibitions such as Expanded Painting, Prague Biennale 6, Prague, CZ (2013); Love Me/Love Me Not, Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan and its Neighbors, The 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, IT (2013); Acquisitions Recentes Du Cabinet
D'Art Graphique, Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR (2018); Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century, The Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2018); Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, CA (2017), which traveled to The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX (2017); A Selection of Recent Acquisitions from The Permanent Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2013); Contemporary Iranian Art in the Permanent Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2012); and Hareng Saur: Ensor and Contemporary Art, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, BE (2010). Banisadr’s works are in important public collections including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg.
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The Weight of Entanglement (wallpaper installation), 2019 Dye on newsprint Dimensions variable
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In the water is a wild happiness, 2019 Acrylic, glass beads, and mica on canvas 68 x 84 inches
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Above Sea Level, 2018 Concrete, acrylic, found stick 12 x 4 x 1 inches
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LEFT Shield, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 11 x 14 inches RIGHT I plunge my hands into the sun, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 20 x 26 inches
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Cooking Flower (front), 2018 Concrete, acrylic, turmeric 10 x 10 x 5 inches
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Cooking Flower (back), 2018 Concrete, acrylic, turmeric 10 x 10 x 5 inches
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LEFT Smoke that Thunders, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 20 x 26 inches RIGHT Hairpin Turns, 2019 Acrylic on raw canvas 12 x 16 inches
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RIGHT Falling, like drops of water, 2019 Acrylic and glass beads on canvas 20 x 26 inches NEXT SPREAD Ceaseless Spectacle, 2017-2019 Mixed media on canvas and linen 11 x 14 inches each
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Becoming Hyphenated Roksana Filipowska
A colorful mass of dyed newsprint emerges from the cornice where the gallery wall meets the ceiling. It cascades down and spills onto the floor, as though to confront the viewer who draws near. Sculpted objects and painted canvases coexist inside the space, suggesting that this paper skin can embrace divergent media, colors, processes, and patterns. Transformed through the various mixed dyes and pooled paint that have seeped into it, the thick newsprint evokes a flowing river or silk fabric billowing in the wind—it telegraphs change. A motif of the serpent emerges across the canvases included in this dynamic newsprint ground. Sometimes taking the form of a snaking line, a coiled pattern, the body of a serpent, or a combination of all three, this meandering motif announces hybridity as a mode of being and a process of transformation. The serpent is one of the oldest and most widespread mythological symbols, evoking protection in ancient Near East cultures, fertility for the Hopi in North America, as well as the cyclical nature 26
of time. Present across the history of humanity, it is a hybrid symbol of initiation, mystery, and change. Natessa Amin’s Hyphen is a mixed-media installation whose inclusion of painting and sculpture alongside newsprint and embroidery stages its titular punctuation mark. Hyphenation is an act of drawing words together while retaining their difference: each word has a legible identity, yet hyphenation also leads them to signify something new. The hyphenated word “close-up,” for instance, evokes nearness and a direction in addition to its modern association with photography and film. Hyphenation also imparts a psychological quality to the “close-up,” where visual scrutiny is equated with revelation and intimacy. Amin’s installation posits hyphenation as a mode of bringing various media and artistic processes together to take dynamic—and hybrid—form. Rather than blending, which blurs the distinction between parts in favor of a larger whole, the hyphen draws individual
entities into relationship. In the installation, the dyed newsprint ground expresses hyphenation. Each point of contact between the dynamic ground and the entities it contains can be imagined as a hyphen, which strings images and objects together into its winding, hybrid, serpentine form. Amin herself embodies a hybrid identity. With family roots spanning India, Kenya, and the Pennsylvania Dutch, Amin grew up attending gatherings around kitchen tables that featured Indian curry dishes alongside stroopwafels, American fruit pies, and Kenyan stew. Food became more than a way of honoring family traditions: it taught Amin that diversity is necessary for balance. Curry is a flavorful dish with a complex combination of spices and herbs. Whereas certain national cuisines prefer to keep different flavors at a distance from one another or feature a more limited palette of tastes, Indian cooking celebrates the rich flavor that emerges from
the balanced combination of opposites. Similarly, the Pennsylvania Dutch strive to find balance between sweet and sour plates—the ideal dinner spread features a matching number of sugary and tart dishes. In Indian and Pennsylvania Dutch cuisines, various flavors are necessary to complete the meal. Diversity here is crucial to achieving balance—an apt metaphor for Amin’s interest in a radical inclusion of difference within her work. When Amin’s grandmother gifted her a set of pots for preparing Indian cuisine, Amin brought these family heirlooms into her studio. Experimenting with the domestic objects, she transformed cooking pots into vessels and molds by pressing them against clay to impress their shape. Choosing to also use the cooking pots for mixing paint and holding small objects, Amin imbues the space of the artist’s studio with domesticity, biography, and everyday rituals while playing with traditional gender roles and cultural 27
practices. Amin’s inclusion of culinary instruments evokes the work of contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who is perhaps best known for preparing Southeast Asian curry dishes and sharing them in the gallery as a public performance of care, hospitality, and bringing people together. Amin is similarly interested in the gesture of gathering different entities into a communal space, but whereas Tiravanija’s cooking transforms various flavors into a single, complex dish that is then distributed, Amin displays each of her diverse “ingredients” across the walls and the floor of the gallery for viewers to witness. While Tiravanija’s cooking alchemizes each ingredient into curry, Amin uses the shared ground of dyed newsprint to hold paintings, images, and objects in a sustained embrace. The newsprint is another important site of alchemy in Hyphen. Gravitating towards throwaway materials for their formal potential and layered cultural associations, Amin began experimenting with newsprint, a low-cost paper consisting mainly of wood pulp, that is commonly used for printing newspapers and advertisements. Due to its perishability, newsprint is rarely archived. It circulates broadly and sometimes acquires alternative use as gift-wrap or scrap paper, but quickly yellows and cracks. Newsprint’s tie to the ephemeral communication genres of daily
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newspapers, community announcements, and advertisements makes the material sticky with social associations. By bringing newsprint into the privileged space of the gallery, Amin activates the latent sculptural and painterly potential of the low-cost, throwaway paper and welcomes the social sphere of mass communication into the distinctive space of the white cube, as well as an economy of recycling and repurposing. For this exhibition, Amin used rollers and brushes to apply paint by flicking, pressing, and rolling dyes onto the absorptive ground of the newsprint paper. In certain places, the different paints have pooled and mixed, blending into one another to evoke a tie-dye pattern or early chemical processes in photography. After the paint dried, Amin sculpted the dyed newsprint into an undulating mass, which became the installation’s structural scaffolding for sculpted objects and canvases vivid with various colors, patterns, and painterly techniques. The sculpted newsprint renders Amin’s practice of radical inclusion in spatial terms, suggesting that the dyed ground also offers a shelter for difference to inhabit. In an interview, Amin cites Frederic Church’s nineteenth-century home, the eclectic Olana mansion in Hudson, New York, as an influence on her work.1 Primarily known as a landscape painter associated with the Hudson River School, Church was also a
self-taught architect and landscape designer, as well as an experienced traveler and art collector. He worked closely with architect Calvert Vaux to design a building that served as a family home and artist’s studio, and combined Victorian, Middle Eastern, Moorish, and Italianate elements, as well as polychrome ornamental stencils that continue across its inside and outside. Not so much a synthesis as a striking example of hyphenation in architecture, Church’s polyglot Olana mansion retains the legibility of each influence. Named after “Olane,” an ancient city in Persia that was once described as a “treasure-storehouse” by the Romans, the mansion fulfills its name. Towering over the landscape, it is a treasure house of the many objects and artworks Church and his wife Isabel collected. Inspired by Olana, Amin approaches art making and exhibition installation as a way of constructing shelters for a radical inclusion of difference. Just as a shelter offers temporary protection, art installations are often impermanent structures. Historically, galleries and museums have been far from safe or inclusive spaces for those embodying hybrid identities, and Amin imbues her artwork with protective talismans. Eyes are a frequent motif in her work. Single and multiple eyes confront the viewer’s
A Web that Warns, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 20 x 26 inches
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gaze and evoke mati, or the evil eye, which is found in cultures across the world to protect from malevolent spirits. But they are also an invitation to look closer. The longer one observes Hyphen, the more the mass of newsprint begins to take the form of a snake, a motif that Amin often pairs with watchful eyes. Another symbol found in various cultures, the snake often signifies transformation and creativity because of its ability to shed its outgrown skin. Comprising numerous layered sheets of paper, the dyed newsprint perhaps suggests the molted skin of a serpent. Amin approaches installations as shelters for metamorphosis. Newsprint has been a generative part of Amin’s practice since 2015, and she continues to bring new materials into its fold. For Hyphen, Amin introduced a black gesso ground to her canvases and began experimenting with glass bead gel, a textural gel with real glass beads that adds a reflective quality to the painted surface. Black ground and luminous surface add dimension to Amin’s vibrant patterns. The matte gesso ground appears embryonic in its rich blackness and the sheen of the painted glass beads
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seems to emerge from this depth. To move around these canvases is to observe painted forms and light effects evolving within the black ground. Under the protective glance of watchful eyes, we are invited to change as well.
1 Natessa Amin, interviewed by Roksana Filipowska in the artist’s studio in Philadelphia, May 3, 2019.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. Roksana Filipowska recently completed her PhD in art history at the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation titled “Plasticity against Plastic: Synthetics in the Practice, Theory, and Conservation of Art since the 1960s.” Her publications include “Ree Morton’s Celastic Turn” in Ree Morton (2019); “Richard Hamilton’s Plastic Problem” in Distillations Magazine; “On Plasticity and Plate Tectonics,” an essay on contemporary artists responding to climate change in Speak Speak; and “In Defiance of Propaganda: Photographic Failure as Shared Ground” in Too Good to be Photographed (Lugemik Press, 2017). Mentor Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015) received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. A former Senior Editor of Art in America, where she remains a Contributing Editor, she has also written for the New York Times and many other publications. Princenthal is the author of Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2010), and a co-author of two recent books on women artists. Her essays have appeared in monographs on artists including Doris Salcedo, Robert Mangold and Alfredo Jaar. She has taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Princeton University; and Yale University; and is currently on the faculty of the MFA Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts. Princenthal’s book Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s will be published in October 2019 by Thames & Hudson.
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CUE Art Foundation's programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals.
MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY Anholt Services (USA), Inc. Aon PLC Chubb Compass Group Management LLC The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation Vedder Price P.C. New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts
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All artwork Š Natessa Amin. Artwork photography by Gordon Stillman. Art direction and design by Shona Masarin-Hurst. Additional design by Lilly Hern-Fondation.
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