NYAB Event - Peter Nadin "Taxonomy Transplanted"

Peter Nadin "Taxonomy Transplanted"

The Horticultural Society of New York

This event has ended.

An exhibition of paintings on handmade paper by Peter Nadin. Like much of his recent work, this series of paintings was created on Old Field Farm in Greene County, NY, and is inspired and facilitated by the farm’s plants, livestock, products, activities, and landscape. The exhibition opens with a reception for the artist featuring a Bootleg Buying Club with products from Old Field Farm, including honey, jams, chutneys, and tea. Since he started farming in 1989, Nadin’s art practice has increasingly overlapped with the day-to-day responsibilities of the farm, from thinning carrots to herding pigs. Although he is reluctant to define farming as art, Nadin’s work acknowledges how each practice influences the other and how the impulses guiding both can be equally creative. He explains, “A carrot is not a work of art. I’m not proposing that anyone think of a carrot as a work of art. But what I am saying is that a carrot and the art I make here are both results of the same process.”

"Taxonomy Transplanted," which is accompanied by a book and a short film, continues Nadin’s exploration of this relationship between art and farming with a focus on consciousness, gesture, and landscape—themes that were integral to his prior body of work, First Mark. Where as the paintings and sculptures in First Mark sought to identify the artist’s consciousness within the basic impulse of mark making, these new works explore the consciousness of plants, animals, and the landscape. Through his process and materials, Nadin directly imbues his paintings with elements of the farm. To create the large, sculptural sheets of paper that are the foundation of his paintings, Nadin harvests cattails and bamboo grown in the bee pasture near his studio, reduces the plant fibers to pulp, and presses the paper in a nearby pond. He applies pigments and dyes to the paper and uses mud and excess pulp to attach dried flowers, roots, branches, honeycombs, and ceramics to the surface of the painting. As Nadin transplants these specimens, he considers how the new context alters their definition.

Nadin further explores the altered state of these transplants through the incorporation of free-associative phrases in the paintings. In a short film made with Aimée Toledano, Nadin notes, “The plant is rooted in the soil; our knowledge of the plant is rooted in language.” When combined with the plant material in the paintings, these phrases suggest a renaming or reclassification. Tomatoes, wheat, and bachelor buttons are Nadin’s “Dead Man’s Pool Party,” “Sunshine Skeleton,” and “BQE Fish Fry.” These names evoke common names of plants, such as “Black-Eyed Susan,” “Cherokee Trail of Tears,” or “Turk’s Turban,” which, contrary to the precision of botanical names, offer a rich interpretation of the plants’ physical appearance or even regional history. Presenting the paintings in deep shadowbox frames and titling the pieces after the featured plant, Nadin references specimen boxes of a naturalist collector. In this way, the pieces do not completely lose their connection to the natural sciences, even though Nadin is challenging and subverting such methods. In the film, Nadin calls out the common and botanical names of the trees and livestock on the farm. Then he renames them, saying, “I realize we have the wrong words for the condition of life and death, but I won’t repent. Instead, I will replant and begin to rename again.” In "Taxonomy Transplanted," Nadin uproots the physical plant and the terminology associated with it, offering his own visual and verbal language to compose a new story.

[Image: Peter Nadin "Wheat II (detail)" (2012) mixed media on handmade bamboo and cattail paper 64 x 40 in. Courtesy of the artist]

Media

• Painting

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