CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/18/2022

The first major monograph on N. Dash

"Untitled" (2016) is reproduced from N. Dash, the first comprehensive overview of the rising NYC- and New Mexico-based artist's work, spanning painting, drawing and photography, at scales large and very small. "The work of N. Dash insists on quiet," Ajay Kurian writes. "The paintings are restrained and forceful, made of both very old materials and new ones: pigment, jute, linen, adobe and string, as well as silkscreen ink, acrylic and styrofoam. They are often in multiple parts, all in deep relation to one another—wrapped, draped, tacked or adjacent. Their details are very precise: a line made by peeling away a string embedded in adobe, a pencil mark on the wall, bolts of canvas dense with paint. The adobe appears almost like cracking suede; the diffusion of pigment looks as if it's the result of some unknown autopoiesis rather than human manufacture. The works are as much formed as they are made—by site, history, by the tempos of their materiality, as slow as the mud, as quick as the glint of graphite. Materials take time to unfold, and it takes time to properly listen. The works are hushed, as if shrouded in their materiality, giving them a stillness that seems almost between life and death."