NYAB Event - Simryn Gill “Holding Patterns”

Simryn Gill “Holding Patterns”

Tracy Williams Ltd.

This event has ended.

“Holding Patterns” is comprised of three new works: 9 Volumes from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 2008, Breathing out, 2010 and Naughts, 2010.

Naughts is made up of circular forms collected by Gill during many walks. These washers, nuts, plastic bands, and seals have been slowly amassed, and are perhaps a measure of time or a record of the absentminded attentiveness this kind of gathering requires. Gill invites her audience to sit at a table and sift through, sort, and rearrange these zero-shaped objects in various materials.

Breathing out is a work made from a collection of books of memoirs and personal stories. Compiled initially in Sydney and completed in New York, the artist further culls torn bits of words and sounds and releases them across a wall of blank paper.

9 Volumes from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, much like her ongoing series Pearls, are nine entire books transformed into nine balls. Gill found these books in an annual library sale held by Sydney University; random numbers apparently rejected by the library from a complete set of nearly a hundred volumes published by the Government of India in the 1960’s. Viewers are invited to touch the balls, pick them up, cradle, and stroke them. Cushions are provided so that one might sit down with the balls and in lowering ourselves to the ground our actions become an unexpected way of ‘taking art’.