N. Dash at MCASB

The solo exhibition by New York–based artist N. Dash that’s currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, registers first as an experience of minimalistic beauty. Large paintings hang in carefully calibrated dialogue, and as one moves through the space, two distinct types emerge. Some are geometric abstractions, often involving two panels joined by a third substance such as Styrofoam or cardboard. The others derive from photographs of cloudy fabric sculptures magnified to many times their original dimensions. Most of the works are executed in a restrained palette of grays, whites, greens, and blues, with the exception of a single recent painting in bright orange and a drawing from the artist’s Commuter series of the same hue. There are no labels on the walls, and the majority of the works, all of which date from 2018 and 2019, are untitled. 

The plot thickens when one understands how the images of the fabric sculptures came about. Art historians use the word “facture” to describe the processes that artists employ to create paintings. Facture typically refers to ways of applying paint — with brushes for sure, but also a variety of other tools, ranging from palette knives, spray cans, and spatulas to the sticks that allowed Jackson Pollock to drip paint onto his floor-mounted canvases.

When it comes to facture, N. Dash represents something unique. The artist carries small pieces of cloth at all times and kneads them constantly. This “recurrent manual manipulation” continues until the individual fragment achieves what the artist considers to be an appropriate state of semi-disintegration. It’s these bits of string or cloth that are then photographed and enlarged before being screen printed onto an adobe ground. For an ongoing series of works on paper titled Commuter, Dash touched and folded pieces of paper until they reached the desired state of frayed readiness, then saturated each piece with a single intense color before affixing it to the wall, unframed and unstretched.