Peter Nadin on Beekeeping, Image-Making, and the Poetic Resonance of Marks

May 28, 2024

British-American artist Peter Nadin has always been a shapeshifter. He moved to New York from Newcastle in 1976, and immediately became accustomed to the Manhattan downtown art scene. For two years, Nadin ran 84 West Broadway, an experimental exhibition space, from his loft in Tribeca with one of the forebears of Institutional Critique, Christopher D’Arcangelo. He also mingled with fellow conceptualists Daniel Buren, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner. Throughout the 1980s, Nadin, along with his peers, maintained an ephemeral and challenging practice, performing manual labor and taking on corporate jobs in an attempt to blur the distinction between high art and everyday life, critiquing the commodification of artistic labor in an increasingly neoliberal era. During that time, he also published poetry books and maintained a rigorous painterly practice that mediated the limit of abstraction in the midst of a robust discourse that sought to define painting’s revival as a principal medium.

While Nadin’s 1980s paintings, along with the contemporaneous Neo-expressionism, can be read as a reaction against the alleged death of painting declared by conceptual art and minimalism in previous decades, they are much less figurative than products of Neo-expressionism and more philosophically concerned with the nature of mark-making. In 1993, Nadin suddenly dropped out of the commercial art world and moved to a farm in Catskills. He felt the gallery system could not support and sustain his demanding and intensive experimentation in painting as mark-making. For almost two decades, Nadin mastered the art of beekeeping, creating meta-paintings about the practice of image-making on the side.

By Qingyuan Deng
Photographs by Alon Koppel. Courtesy of the artist and Off Paradise, New York.

In the mid 2010s, the art world finally caught up with Nadin and he started showing paintings at commercial galleries again. Recent exhibitions have focused on what Nadin calls “painting from life,” gestural marks about memories of his days in the Catskills and his impressions of the community around him. For his debut exhibition at Off Paradise, a project space run by Paris-born curator Natacha Polaert, Nadin showcased The Distance from a Lemon to Murder, a series of paintings he made during the pandemic shelter-in-place, situated somewhere between the real and the imaginary, about the threat of interpersonal domination lurking beneath the mundanity of the countryside. Nadin’s current exhibition at Off Paradise, The Invisible World, explores the unbridgeable separation between seeing and remembering, leading to incredibly moving moments.

Shall we start with the elephant in the room? You stopped exhibiting paintings formally for many years. What sparked your interest in returning to exhibiting painting in a commercial context?

I stopped exhibiting paintings because the painting that I was doing from the 1990s onwards was outside of the conventions of what we think of as painting, traditionally understood to be the intention of making marks. What interested me was the unintentional mark and resonance of activity, which were areas of exploration that really inform my painting activities. The more recent work I am doing really incorporates all those possibilities and there isn’t anything that’s by design or by necessity excluded from the possibility of mark making. When Natacha invited me to do a show, I agreed to showcase these possibilities.

Adam Installing Utilities in the Garden of Eden Under the Devil’s Fire, 2023

How do your paintings fall outside of the traditional trajectory of painting making or mark making?

Curiously, over the years that I’ve been working, I realized that you can’t really judge what a painting is purely by what it looks like. You can have very unconventional paintings that are actually within the convention of painting. And you can have things that appear to be in a convention of practicality but are quite radical. You can’t always tell. It’s interesting to find out an approach that enables me to understand those differentiations. With those first mark paintings, it was unintentional, and there were no conventions. I didn’t know what was going to happen. When I look back at them, some of them seem quite beautiful, even though I had no intention of making a mark that would have any apparent meaning. Thus, I became interested in if meaning can reside in something that’s entirely unintentional, or if one has to intend to describe something that gives meaning.

And you were showing them in very unconventional settings or places.

I stopped exhibiting my paintings around 1993. I didn’t really have an agenda, I just wanted to explore different things. I began farming and became very interested in beekeeping. A few years later, I went down to Cuba as the US representative to the South American Beekeeping Conference. At the conference, I met a number of artists and curators who share similar ideas about the way agriculture could inform artistic practice. There was no market for contemporary art in Cuba, even though there’s a tremendous cultural heritage. They valued art in a very different way, for its spiritual meaning.

Through a friend working at the Wilfredo Lam Center, I met Hector, a beekeeper. I told Hector I hadn’t really shown anything in many years, because I didn’t really connect with the context. And he said, “Why don’t you do something down here?” That's how I started a painting show in Cuba. The show was met with enthusiasm and traveled around the island through the Center. And then a couple of years later, I did another show that traveled more extensively, it even went down to Cuenca, Equator. What’s wonderful about these shows is that the response was purely about what they meant, what it was, or what I was offering to them, since there’s no commercial engagement.

You made the paintings in this room while you were living in Catskills and they really pay attention to your surroundings and your memory of the environment and the people in your life? How does it feel to paint your life and your immediate circles?

At the end of the day, that's what I know and that’s how my time is spent. And I hope that I give the environment and the people that I represent the due respect, because the people that I see, know, and interact with are a subject so integrated within my life.

When you paint a landscape, they’re citing and constantly responding to so many important art-historical movements. Are you thinking about the history of art you’re a part of, or are you more just thinking about your immediate experiences or your biography when you paint?

It’s all part of the same thing. The experience that one has is going to manifest through movements of the hand and the arm. I approach a painting as if all those possibilities were already there. Sometimes it may have a resonance with some part of our history, and sometimes it may not. But I think if a painting is successful, it should not have subconsciousness. If the subconscious is present, it can interfere with the reading of the painting. I personally just paint hoping that I can give form to experience.

Three Self Portraits and a Ripening Lemon, 2023

Looking East, Seeing West, 2023

The paintings here have this poetic sensibility to them. You’re also a poet. I'm wondering if the two practices ever correlate with each other. Does your poetry nourish your painting, or vice versa?

Yes, they’re very closely related. I think evocation of the word is very close to the mark and the evocation of the mark. I can write poetry because I understand the poetic resonance of words, in the same way as I understand the poetic resonance of marks. The two inform each other without necessarily being bound up by the convention of the sentence, or the convention of the procedure of art making.

Let’s go back in history a little bit. You were a part of the downtown conceptual art collectives The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince & Winters. The collective itself was very interested in the circulation of image, information, and language and was producing very different works. The paintings in this room still feel connected to your earlier endeavor, in the sense that these paintings are very much thinking about the instability of memory and its circulation. Could you talk a little bit more about your interest in the porous boundary between self and the world?

It is really true that they are all part of the same inquiry, only the forms it takes are sometimes different. When I started painting when I was nine years old, one of the things that I like about the painted surface is that it can only have two functions. You can either look at it, or if it’s waterproof oil paint, you can use it to patch a roof or put it on the side of a chicken house. In other words, it’s indivisible. What we were doing with The Offices was not indivisible, because it could lead to other possibilities. I didn’t really know if our commitment to engage with the community could lead to some kind of long-term change. It’s an open question, as I’m not trained in those areas. However, I remain very interested in what social change and the method to achieve that might look like. My sense is that we are constantly engaging with perceptual and cognitive information from which one creates the will for transformation. If you want to create a different understanding of the world, you will create different procedures first.

What strikes me is that even though your paintings are so conceptually engaged with ideas of memory and information, it still feels very pleasant to look at them because there’s such a humor to them. What is your relationship to evoking emotions, especially humor, in your approach to paintings?

I think all of this must be present. Humor is such a necessity to create meaning. In a sense, it’s absurd to try to make sense of extremes with only our rational sense. Who would feel obliged to do it? In fact, some of the most profound, beautiful explorations of consciousness relies on humor. Nothing should be excluded from the beginning.

Sharkey’s Donkey Watching a Fish (A Migration of Golden Orfe), 2023

What are you looking forward to next?

I’m beginning to work on a new body painting. It often begins with a word or with a thought, a sense that there may be something that will light a little fire within the world. I don’t know if this little flame will develop into a conflagration. But if there is something, normally it takes about five years to be fully revealed.

Time feels so essential to your practice. You are often intentionally slowing down the temporality of experiencing your paintings.

Maybe in 15 or 20 years I can begin to see if I wish to paint in a certain different way. I can always begin again.

The Programmer, 2022.

The Secret Wedding of the Invisible Man, 2022.

Art

Pamela Sneed’s Speaking Tongue opens at Dashwood Projects

November 15, 2024

Pamela Sneed’s latest exhibition, Speaking Tongue, will be on view at Dashwood Projects from November 20 to December 21. The show features twenty watercolor and ink paintings inspired by her recent trip to Kenya, where she was deeply moved by the elegance of giraffes, the landscapes, and the energy of Nairobi.

Blending her background as a poet and visual artist, Sneed’s work reflects on themes of identity, nature, and connection. Her paintings capture the beauty and spirit of the animals she encountered, alongside reflections on her own experiences as part of the African diaspora.

This exhibition marks Sneed’s first solo show with Dashwood Projects and will be accompanied by a new book, also titled Speaking Tongue, to be released in December.

By Enzo Holdt
Artworks by Pamela Sneed

Art

Tiebreaker - Alvin Armstrong

November 15, 2024

There is a moment of silence right before the play. Just before the racket strikes the ball as it hangs weightless in the air, breathless and charged. It’s the fleeting yet decisive instant that can alter the course of the match, determining who wins and who loses.

Alvin Armstrong depicts this crucial moment in his new exhibition Tiebreaker, symbolizing the risks and rewards of competition. It’s an implication of something else at stake, where athletes push not only their bodies, but their spirits to the absolute limit.

The dynamic figures embody the strength, grace, and agility juxtaposed by the vibrant color palette evoking not just the joy of competition but the charged energy of the court.

Tiebreaker is opening Thursday, November 16th at Anna Zorina Gallery.

By Rea Brayshaw
Artworks by Alvin Armstrong

Art

The Things People Are Ashamed To Take Photos Of: The Photography and Films of Yuhan Cheng

Yuhan’s latest exhibition of photo and video work titled 窗子外 Outside the Window, Inside the Tank 鱼缸里 takes its namesake from what could’ve been a mundane encounter. A month after moving to New York City from Chengdu, China, they stumbled across an abandoned fish tank left curbside. It reminded them of “the rotating fish in a tank that faded into the background of their mother’s home in Chengdu”, a thread connecting childhood familiarity that transformed into a symbol of greater significance in adulthood. A tank is a world within a world; a microcosm secluded from the broader chaos of the outside. Since then Yuhan has captured the other kinds of “fish tanks” closest to them in their photography and short films. Not literal ones necessarily– but intimate confined spaces in Chengdu and NYC where time stands still.

In the midst of taking snapshots of loved ones, Yuhan decided to turn their tender but examining lens on themselves. They realized shooting self-portraits unraveled a deeper understanding of their own nonbinary gender and queer sexuality. Yuhan admits in one of their short films “I hide from looking at my own body.” Yet, in the seclusion of their room which doubles as a dark room, Yuhan began to develop their first nude photos chronicling the subtle wounds; bitten cuticles, bruises, and scrapes they’ve accumulated involuntarily, once again documenting the things people choose to hide.

窗子外 Outside the Window, Inside the Tank 鱼缸里, debuted at FAR-NEAR Studio Hours a gallery in Chinatown focused on expanding the art world's view of Asia and Asian artists curated by Lulu Yao Gioiello. The event merged Yuhan’s works from the past three years, including 70 photographs, three short documentaries, and one installation. There was something uncanny about the gallery’s atmosphere – from the dollar store teal green curtains obscuring every window to the clusters of framed photos mimicking how photos of relatives are displayed in one’s childhood home, to the darkened lighting that was both disorienting and cozy. All these details were meticulously chosen to imitate the rooms depicted in Yuhan’s films and photography. In other words, the audience was invited to Yuhan’s “fishtank”, to share the odd balance of comfort and unease of being known intimately. We talked to Yuhan at Cafe Reggio to understand how their latest body of work came into being.

Initially, I was exploring my friends’ identities through the lens, but slowly, it became a tool to confront and understand my own queerness and gender identity.

Ora Margolis— Were any memories/childhood experiences you had in Chengdu important to how you've developed as an artist?

Yuhan Cheng— Growing up in Chengdu, especially in a military household, shaped and gave me a source of contention how I understood my identity. There was always a sense of conflict when it came to my body and feeling like I didn’t quite fit the expectations around me. This tension has been a driving force in my practice, pushing me to explore identity and belonging in my work.

Tell us a bit about your latest exhibition Outside the Window, Inside the Tank at Far. What headspace were you in when taking these photos?

YC— Outside the Window, Inside the Tank is about the fluidity of self; our bodies, our environments, and our identities. The idea of water as both a symbol of confinement and freedom is central to the photos and film that comprise the exhibit. This fluidity much like how I see my experience moving between Chengdu and New York, where similar feelings follow me no matter where I am. Water mirrors the body, the frame, and the room, which are all containers of the self.

Previously, you’ve said you wanted the exhibition space to look "like your room". How did you make that happen and why is your NYC room important to you?

YC— My room in NYC is an extension of my identity. It’s where I feel vulnerable and where I explore myself most openly. It’s a manifestation of my sense of self. I recreated certain elements in the exhibition—the green sheer curtains, the dollar store shower curtain with bubbles, and the center installation depicted a self-portrait deteriorating in water, reminiscent of a fish in a tank. This room, like any other room or container, magnifies the tension of self-exploration.

Has your idea or comfort with your gender identity and /sexuality changed since you’ve delved into photography?

YC— Yes. The process of photography and filming has been a mirror to my own understanding of self. Initially, I was exploring my friends’ identities through the lens, but slowly, it became a tool to confront and understand my own queerness and gender identity. The process of photographing my queer friends and then myself allowed me to come to terms with who I am.

How did you and Lulu Yao of FAR-NEAR Studio meet, and what makes her a good collaborator?

YC— We first connected when I reached out with my series Princess of Funan River. Lulu understood the struggles and complexities in the work and she invited me to expand on those ideas with her. Our collaboration has worked because Lulu truly resonates with the themes I’m drawn to, like fluidity, transformation, and the intimacy of navigating belonging.

After completing Fish Tank and Remnants of an Amateur Film, what kind of movie do you want to make next?

YC— Right now, I’m more focused on writing. I need to understand what I want to say before making another film. Writing helps me find clarity;it’s a crucial part of my process.

What kind of camera do you use and why?

YC— I use a Canon AE-1. I started with it and I still love it. It's small, spontaneous, easy to use, and light. It allows me to capture moments naturally without overthinking.

What's your biggest fear?

YC— Being disconnected from my sense of self, from others, and from the things I love.

When do you feel most like yourself?

YC— It’s during those fleeting moments when I complete a project. That feeling fades quickly, leaving me searching for the next project to reconnect with that sense of fulfillment.

How do you want people to feel when they interact with your art?

YC— I want them to feel whatever resonates with them. I don’t want to prescribe the experience; it should feel right for each person.

Your work focuses on the close knit communities that surround you or various metaphorical “fish tanks”. What communities do you feel closest to?
YC— The queer artist community, both in Chengdu and NYC, has been a source of comfort and understanding for me. There’s something about shared struggles and shared creative language that feels like home.

What's the biggest difference between living life as a queer artist in NYC and in Chengdu?

YC— In both NYC and Chengdu, I’m learning more about myself. NYC offers a sense of freedom, while Chengdu is home, a place of comfort and history. Neither place defines me but both are significant parts of my path.

What are your next moves/goals?

YC— I want to continue exploring both film and photography, expanding my narrative style and experimenting across mediums. During my show, I found new ways of seeing my photographs such as by adding a window screen between frames or letting a self-portrait fade and grow mold in water. These approaches allowed me to see my work not just as 2D images but as 3D objects.

I want to keep pushing the boundaries of how photo and film can interact, and I’m also interested in trying photojournalism. My focus remains on collaborating across mediums and continuing to accumulate experiences that I can translate into sincere honest work.