High Chair and Other Works
Nancy Azara
GALLERY II
Detail, Nancy Azara, High Chair, 2019, carved, painted and gilded wood, steel, 50 x 14 x 56 inches.
July 2 — August 1, 2021
Opening Reception: Friday, July 2, 12-6pm (by appointment)
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce High Chair and Other Works, an exhibition by Nancy Azara. Sculpture, mixed media collage banners, and small paintings stand in the gallery as embodiments of the artist’s spirit and early memories. Throughout the show, Azara balances instinctive mark making against more considered decisions. She ultimately arrives at a dynamic interplay between deliberate manipulation of materials and image and the operation of chance, engaging intuitively with journeys of the spirit, reflections on the passage of time, and the primal essence of womanhood.
Azara’s latest series of works on paper embrace mortality. The abstracted Crow and Sandal collages, strewn with symbolism and flourishes of the hand, are filtered through the artist’s recent near-death experience. In this set of small collages on paper emerges the crone aspect of the Triple Goddess like never before in her work. Flying into unknown wildernesses and jet black nights, the crow serves as a symbolic messenger between worlds. Within the Hindu pantheon, crows represent spirituality. Rendered in a fashion which involves hyper tactile techniques such as rubbing, cutting, pasting and scraping, each page is marred by smears and residues of imperfect human touch. The curious black winged ones strewn across the page are in flux, misshapen or obscured in places. Even then, they are ribboned with hints of gold and a translucence achieved by layers of parchment paper. In these carefully rendered, almost painterly Crow and Sandal compositions, the sandal returns in Azara’s work, bearing its close relationship in Hinduism to the feet and footprint of the guru. In this collage series about near death, the sandal connotes the ultimate realization of the spiritual— the artist’s own infinite attempt to examine and suspend her power in time and space.
Thank you to Katie Cercone and Maeve Hogan for their contributions to this text.
Nancy Azara is a sculptor based in New York City. Her work has been shown extensively, most recently in a solo show Crow and Sandal Series and Other Works at Kaaterskill Gallery, Hunter Village, NY (Aug 24–Oct 6, 2019); Labyrinths of the Mind at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY (May 17-Jun 30,2019); Nancy Azara: Nature Prints at Saint John’s University, Queens, NY; and Crossing Boundaries: Material as Message at (RoCA), West Nyack, NY. She is the author of Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art (2002), available through Red Wheel/Weiser. She has taught many workshops and classes.
Photography: Sebastian Bach