Nancy Dwyer - "What?"

Influenced by commercialization and popular culture, Dwyer’s text and language-based sculptures and installations, complete with wallpaper, two-dimensional pictures and objects, are seamless with our everyday lives. Her use of common consumer materials, such as Formica, MP3 players, plastic balls, window blinds and glass beads further challenges the distinction between what is real and represented, objective and subjective as well as high versus low art.

New text-based sculptures and installations by visual artist Nancy Dwyer will be featured in her first solo exhibition at David Richard Gallery. The exhibition, “WHAT” will be presented October 24 - December 6, 2014 with an opening reception on Friday, October 24 from 5:00 - 7:00 PM. The gallery is located at 544 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, phone 505-983-9555 in the Santa Fe Railyard Arts District.

Nancy Dwyer’s art making practice uses words as both image and object. She learned the aesthetics of Modernism, but lived Pop Art and was an early practitioner of Conceptual Art. To make artwork accessible to everyone—a career objective—she chose to use graphically designed text, the medium of advertising and mass consumerism. Surrounded by commercialization and popular culture, her text and language-based sculptures and installations, complete with wallpaper, two-dimensional pictures and objects, are seamless with our everyday lives. Her use of common consumer materials, such as Formica, MP3 players, plastic balls, window blinds and glass beads further challenges the distinction between what is real and represented, objective and subjective as well as high versus low art. The context in which Dwyer presents her three-dimensionalized words is what triggers a deeper analysis of the actual letters and word. The viewer is challenged to reconsider the “normal” meaning of the word and which aspect of class, privilege and social equity that Dwyer is trying to decode and demystify, or the most common and mundane phrase that she is attempting to transcend. The title of this exhibition is “WHAT”. However, Dwyer is not asking a specific question. Instead, she is inviting us to ponder words and phrases in different situations and contexts.

Nancy Dwyer has been exhibiting her word sculptures, paintings and multimedia installations worldwide for over twenty five years. As well as numerous solo exhibits, Dwyer has shown work at major museums, including most recently her retrospetive exhibition at the Emily Fisher Landau Center, Long Island City, NY, “The Pictures Generation” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with the Whitney Museum of American Art, MOCA Los Angeles, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Texas, the Kunsthalle Wein, Austria, The Dunedin Public Art Gallery in New Zealand and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Her public art commissions are installed in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia and in Europe. Dwyer’s artwork is in the permanent collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis, TN; Rooseum, Malmo, Sweden; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; The Progressive Corporation, OH; and The Pheonix Museum of Art. Dwyer is currently Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of Vermont.

David Richard Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in Santa Fe, specializes in post-war abstract art including Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, geometric and hard-edge painting, Op Art, Pop Art, Minimalism, Feminism and Conceptualism in a variety of media. Featuring both historic and contemporary artwork, the gallery represents many established artists who were part of important art historical movements and tendencies that occurred during the 1950s through the 1980s on both the east and west coasts. The gallery also represents artist estates, emerging artists and offers secondary market works.