David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce our second solo gallery exhibition with Chakaia Booker, Empty Seat, on view from November 1 to December 21, 2024.

Chakaia Booker is one of the foremost sculptors of her generation. For over four decades, Booker has masterfully manipulated the rubber tire into forms previously unimaginable. In doing so she elevates the material to new heights, showcasing her distinct ability in sculptures ranging from the petite to the monumental. Booker, who has referred to herself not only as an abstract and conceptual artist but as a “narrative environmental sculptor,” embeds the tire with profound meaning, speaking to issues of environmental destruction, socioeconomic disparity, and the exploitation of labor. In working with repurposed materials, Booker also brings the history of the original maker and the consumer’s personal use to the viewer, and the audience can choose if or how it becomes a part of their experience of the work. Booker consciously incorporates tires that show the wear and tear of use, encompassing that individual’s history of movement and the traces of their life.

Chakaia Booker: Empty Seat highlights a select group of works by Chakaia Booker spanning from 1996 to 2019. United in their versatility, each sculpture explores a slightly different angle of the artist’s production. While Booker’s medium remains the same within the exhibited group, each work represents a different solution to Booker’s wrestling with the innate challenges of working with rubber tire. Their dimensions, technique, and method of display all radically differ, demonstrating Booker’s artistic breadth. This exhibition is a rare opportunity to encounter the full range of Booker’s use of gesture, material, and scale.

Empty Seat (2006) is grand and theatrical compared to the restrained solemnity of Booker's untitled work from 1996. Despite their similarity in size, the repetitive undulations of the untitled piece are confined to the wooden space of their frame; Empty Seat explodes with movement and chaos, like an untamed wilderness. Empty Seat can also be displayed either outdoors or indoors, further highlighting the singularity of Booker’s medium. The tendrils cascading from Strayed (2019) make the tough, thick material of the rubber tire appear delicate and fragile. Bottom Half (2008) has a zoomorphic quality; it almost seems like a sea urchin, a living thing pulled from a heap of discarded tires. While the former balances a contained center framed by unconstrained ribbons of tire, the latter assumes a similar visual starting point with only minor deviations from its constricted center. In this way, Bottom Half is perhaps more comparable to 1996's untitled work in its tightness, size comparisons aside. Each possible permutation of sculptural duo in Chakaia Booker: Empty Seat allows for a rich visual debate.