Dominic Nurre “Selections From The Collection Of Larry V. Nurre”

FIERMAN

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FIERMAN presents Selections from the Collection of Larry V. Nurre, a solo exhibition by New York based artist Dominic Nurre. The show is the first iteration of an extended conceptual portrait of American conservative masculinity realized through the possessions of the artist’s late father.

Upon his father’s death, Dominic Nurre inherited a large collection of taxidermy hunting trophies from both the American West and Africa, a leather bound collection of the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman, and a copy of Playboy signed by cover star Jessica Hahn, among other personal effects. The artist has extrapolated from these objects a materialist portrait, a record of late twentieth century American masculinity. The project is at once deeply intimate and intellectually remote, the objects removed from their personal, private context and displayed as cultural artifacts to be examined. The project is open-ended, as Nurre continues to interrogate his father’s possessions and their cultural implications.

The exhibition is comprised of the head of an American Buffalo, one of several hunted by the elder Nurre in the Dakotas and Montana, placed on the floor of the gallery rather than mounted to the wall as originally displayed, as well as a series of letters written in the 1980’s by Larry V. Nurre to his mother from the Federal Prison Camp in Duluth, Minnesota, where he served a sentence for conspiracy and fraud relating to federally funded road construction projects in Southern Minnesota. The aesthetic of display is cool, non-emotive.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the Duluth Letters will be published in their entirety alongside a new essay by Frank Haines, written in response to the material. Dominic Nurre (b. 1980) lives and works in New York. His work has been included in many group shows, including at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Team, Ellis King, Berggruen Gallery, among others. He has had solo shows at Terence Koh’s Asia Song Society (ASS) and Helper Projects in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. His work was in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 in 2010. In 2015, Nurre was a resident at the Fire Island Artist Residency in Cherry Grove, FI and at the KHOJ International Workshop in Pune, India.