David Nolan Gallery is pleased to present “As Above, So Below,” a group exhibition featuring Brígida Baltar, Monica Bonvicini, Chakaia Booker, Hana Miletić, and Gabriela Salazar. The exhibition gathers five international artists active across disparate media and disciplines, united in their unwavering commitment to materials and paradoxical potential for transformation and regeneration.

Since the mid-1990’s, Monica Bonvicini has used mundane and industrial materials in her work to critique the language and structures of power and architecture as gendered symbols of domination. In BeltDecke #4 [Belt Blanket], a tapestry of interwoven black leather belts hangs tough, yet limply, as if coming undone. Formally it may suggest a military pennant, yet it is clearly hand-woven, alluding to crafts traditionally associated with women’s labor, conflating domesticity with the military-industrial complex. At once seductive and antagonistic, Bonvicini’s work treats fear and desire as equally commodified and fetishized. 

Brígida Baltar began working within the intimate confines of her home in Botafogo, a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, in the early 1990’s, performing “small poetic gestures” and documenting actions with photography, drawing and sculpture. The bricks derived from that residence have been a continuous element of her practice, as a corporeal presence that unites past and present. In A horta da casa [The Home Garden] a pseudo-minimalist linear composition of bricks transforms into a personal garden, sprouting various herbs and spices over time. Upon close inspection the bricks are irregular and flawed, originating from Baltar’s said personal interior, each imperfect and barely stable, providing the precarious support for an ever-evolving landscape. In Canto brocado [Corner brocade], brick turns to literal and ornate dust, and a decidedly pre-industrial installation evoking Brazilian edifice and structural support in turn converts into a phantom space for architectural and psychological shape shifting, whereby the personal becomes collective memory. 

Chakaia Booker has worked with her signature material, rubber tires, since the 1980’s, when she first began to consider the material in relation to the body and specifically, wearable garments. Her singular practice has exponentially transformed the material in subsequent decades into works of immense scale and beauty. Splintered Reality greets the viewer head on, at once familiar and threatening, the toughness of its construction bellied by its intimacy and interior potential. Its tactile quality is matched by the pungent odor of the rubber, which only heightens the physical experience of the work. Booker’s practice is situated between the industrial and ecological, recycling the ubiquitously discarded and worn-out tires into transformative works of universal impact and potential. While the material is uniform, Booker’s techniques range from shearing, weaving, riveting, and twisting into organic, expressive forms that steer toward abstraction but often anthropomorphize and historicize the physicality and labor inherent in her practice. 

In Hana Miletic’s practice, the domestic and laborious act of weaving is linked with the social and documentary photography of her subject matter: the haphazard repairs she witnesses in public space. As part of Miletić’s ongoing body of work, “Materials,” the three works on view are formally based on incidental acts of mending the artist finds in the streets of her native Zagreb, and Brussels, where she is partly based, e.g., a cracked rear view mirror hurriedly mended with red tape, a dilapidated building façade barely held in place.