Untitled
2019
Adobe, acrylic, graphite, enamel, linen, jute, wood and aluminum support

Untitled
2019
Adobe, pigment, enamel, acrylic, linen, Styrofoam, jute

N. Dash (b. 1980) was born in Miami Beach, Florida, and earned a BA from New York University in 2003, and an MFA from Columbia University, in 2010. Dash’s work in sculpture, painting and photography is the product of a unique, multipart creative practice that seeks to register lived experience and bodily intelligence through material. Her works, primarily made of natural items such as linen and adobe, give physical form to the intangible and the imagined.

As she moves through the world, Dash always carries a small piece of cloth, which she obsessively works between her fingers until it nearly loses all structural integrity, and she must take up a new piece of fabric to begin the process again. Dash then arranges these delicate artifacts and photographs them; the resulting abstractions function as the origin of her practice, or what the artist calls her “primary source material.” Her Commuter series (2011– ) is an ongoing project in which the artist repeatedly folds, unfolds and refolds a piece of paper during her daily subway ride. Once coated with oil, pigment or graphite powder and hung flat on the wall, these works hover in the indeterminate zone between planar fields and sculptural objects.