Nancy Shaver “Fastness, Slowness And Monstrous Beauty”

Derek Eller Gallery

This event has ended.

In front of, in back of, to the side and around and through. These are the facts of being “someplace.” Context defines. Can context shift sideways as well as up and down? In my 50 years of art making, this has been my primary concern. Context need not be narrowing. There are a billion threads. Billions of objects, billions of thoughts, I am a part of it all.

I will be showing new work, made over the last year. Work based on the many years of being an artist, knowledge gained bit by bit.

I am joined by fellow artists Max Goldfarb and Sterrett Smith. We have created a unit we are totally committed to exploring. Wolf Tones. This is the second version of Wolf Tones. WOLF TONES II. The first iteration happened last spring at Soloway Gallery in Brooklyn. The third part will happen at Oakville Galleries in Toronto, Canada, in the fall of 2021. There will be a small book published by Sobercove Press published in the spring of 2021.

This is my third solo show at Derek Eller Gallery.

-Nancy Shaver

WOLF TONES

As a model for our work together, we have come to think of ‘wolf tones’ as an exquisitely discordant pairing of sounds. By definition, to a musician, the strings of an instrument playing a specific (‘wolf’) note, which vibrates at the same frequency as the instrument itself, produces a sound likened to the howling of a wolf. This resulting tone can be difficult for the body-mind to absorb. Our individual works are equidistant. The spaces between one another and the open frame works like a visible plan, informs a community of thought and instinct that leads from ‘working on’ to ‘working out’, towards agreement. Underlying our collaborative construction of parts, is the observation of the world around and outside us, processed simultaneously through three different points of view. The raw materials we base our work and our construction on are Things … borrowed from the world, rendered, modified, incorporated or outright reinvented.

-Max Goldfarb, Nancy Shaver and Sterrett Smith

Nancy Shaver has shown in New York City for more than 40 years. Her work was included in a 2015 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor), in VIVA ARTE VIVA, curated by Christine Macel, at La Biennale di Venezia in 2017, and more recently (2018) in two national group shows –Outliers and American Vanguard Art at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery curated by Lynne Cooke and Helen Molesworth’s final show at LA MOCA, One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art. A co-founder of Hudson, New York’s Incident Report, Shaver has been teaching in the Bard College MFA program for more than 20 years. She is a resident of Jefferson, N.Y.