Yamini Nayar | If stone could give

GALLERY WENDI NORRIS OFFSITE EXHIBITION

3344 24th Street, San Francisco, CA

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, January 14, 2019 — Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present “If stone could give”, an exhibition of new photographic works by Yamini Nayar, marking her first solo exhibition with the gallery and her West Coast solo debut.

“If stone could give” explores the fundamental intersection of sculpture and photography in Nayar’s artistic practice. Bearing strong reference to both Modernist architectural structures, informal building strategies and corporeal forms, the works invite viewers into distinctly psychological environments. Nayar’s compositions draw visually on the relationships between architecture and the body, and the cultural, emotional and spatial resonance of our constructed surroundings. Like the exhibition’s title, “If stone could give”, the works on view blur the boundary between animate gestures and inanimate constructs.

Within her studio, Nayar builds her sculptural subjects from simple materials - cardboard, plaster, house paint, wood, string, cut paper and photographs, and other industrial materials and studio debris. Nayar documents the process of construction and deconstruction in hundreds of film and digital photographs.

Ultimately, she creates a single photographic image as the only relic of the tableaux. The laborious process of building and unbuilding remains only in memory and metaphor as she destroys the sculpture to start anew. Nayar describes her work as “exploring psychological relationships to the built environment, the tensions between planned and informal architectures, memory and erasure, material and psychic spaces.”

The exhibition presents large and medium-scale photographs mounted on Dibond and frameless, leaning or hanging on supports within the environment. The presentation invites the viewer into a space of process and further blurs the lines between object and image. 

“If stone could give” is Gallery Wendi Norris’ fifth offsite exhibition and is presented at 3344 24th Street in San Francisco. Built in 1924, the building boasts classic San Francisco architectural elements, including a small un-finished basement characterized by low ceilings and exposed framework. Like Nayar’s artworks, the space boasts juxtaposing characteristics of refined and raw, light-filled and cavernous, new and old.  At the heart of the Mission District, the exhibition is adjacent nearby cultural institutions including the The 500 Capp Street Foundation, Kadist Foundation, Galería de la Raza, The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, The Women’s Building, Ratio 3 Gallery, Et Al. Gallery, and more.