Rose Nolan
Immod­est Ges­tures & Irra­tional Thoughts

This exhi­bi­tion — com­pris­ing three works — is the out­come of Nolan’s con­tin­ued inter­est in the com­plex­i­ty of the art object (process, mate­ri­als, scale, con­tent, his­to­ry) and the ways in which it can both trans­form, and be trans­formed by the space (archi­tec­tur­al site, social and cul­tur­al con­text) in which it is placed. This is fur­ther enhanced by its rela­tion­ship to the view­er in real time and space.

Big Words (Not Mine) Irra­tional thoughts should be fol­lowed absolute­ly and log­i­cal­ly (cir­cle work) is a large, sus­pend­ed, mul­ti-curved, cur­tain like struc­ture, con­struct­ed with the cir­cle (8,860 of them to be pre­cise) and the grid, blur­ring the bound­aries between front and back; between paint­ing, sculp­ture, and archi­tec­ture. Form and con­tent are enmeshed and the process indi­cates an obvi­ous predilec­tion for rep­e­ti­tion, count­ing and man­u­al labour. A process some­times — and by neces­si­ty — shared with oth­ers in the mak­ing of the work, con­tribut­ing to an embed­ded or latent ener­gy con­tained with­in its struc­ture. Mate­ri­als include paint and hes­s­ian, but also mate­ri­als of a more ephemer­al nature such as time, space, light and lan­guage. The piece also func­tions as a back­drop for pos­si­ble activ­i­ty form­ing momen­tar­i­ly inhab­it­able nooks for the vis­i­tor to hide, con­tem­plate or socialize.

Immod­est Ges­tures # 1 and #2 (propo­si­tions for a bill­board) bring togeth­er the ongo­ing series of black and white pho­tographs doc­u­ment­ing my stu­dio process known as ​‘Me Work­ing’, and their his­tor­i­cal point of ref­er­ence — the black and white stu­dio shots of Jack­son Pol­lock famous­ly tak­en by Hans Namuth over 60 years ago. With an inter­est in the per­for­ma­tive nature of the artist in action in the stu­dio, rather than Jack­son Pol­lock in par­tic­u­lar, these images are play­ful­ly and mis­chie­vous­ly brought into dia­logue with each oth­er for the first time as halftone screen prints.