Flash Art uses cookies strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website, for its legitimate interest to enhance your online experience and to enable or facilitate communication by electronic means. To learn more about cookies please see Terms & conditions

Flash Art
Flash Art
Shop
  • Home
    • CURRENT ISSUE
  • Features
    • Conversations
    • Reviews
    • Report
    • On View
    • Audacious Advice
    • Dance Office
    • Listening In
    • The Uncanny Valley
    • Flashback
    • (In)Visible Hands
    • PARADIGME
  • STUDIOS
    • Dune
    • Flash Art Mono
  • Archive
    • DIGITAL EDITION
    • Shop
    • Subscription
    • INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION
    • Contact
→
Flash Art

#328 Nov 2019–Jan 2020, Reviews

9 December 2019, 4:00 pm CET

Nayland Blake Institute of Contemporary Art / Los Angeles by Andrew Greene

by Andrew Greene December 9, 2019
1
2
3
4
5
6
Nayland Blake, “No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake”, 2019. Installation view at ICA, Los Angeles. Courtesy of ICA, Los Angeles.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Nayland Blake, “No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake”, 2019. Installation view at ICA, Los Angeles. Courtesy of ICA, Los Angeles.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Nayland Blake, “No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake”, 2019. Installation view at ICA, Los Angeles. Courtesy of ICA, Los Angeles.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Nayland Blake, “No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake”, 2019. Installation view at ICA, Los Angeles. Courtesy of ICA, Los Angeles.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Nayland Blake, “No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake”, 2019. Installation view at ICA, Los Angeles. Courtesy of ICA, Los Angeles.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Nayland Blake, “No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake”, 2019. Installation view at ICA, Los Angeles. Courtesy of ICA, Los Angeles.

Since the mid-1980s, Nayland Blake has engaged the politics and aesthetics of identity in America. Biracial, queer, and gender nonconforming, Blake (preferred pronoun: they/them) draws from these positions to confront their anxiety both with how popular culture represents identity and, in turn, how they represent identity in their own work.
One hundred and two of Blake’s works are restaged at the ICA LA in “No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake.” Throughout Blake’s career, sculpture, performance, video, and drawing have functioned as tools for interrogating traditional strategies of representation and categorization. Blake merges conceptual art motifs with a hands-on, materialist approach producing works that could be mistakenly seen as post-Minimalist, but instead operate with a decidedly more playful and personal sensibility.
Sleek metal structures become tableau for BDSM and kink scenes, sculptural assemblages reflect the frailty of materiality and their subject matter, and intimate videos and drawings directly introduce Blake’s subjectivity to the viewer. The survey relies heavily on works produced from the late 1980s through the 1990s, and in this period Blake deftly navigated the fraught landscape of the culture wars, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the rising tide of conservative politics in America. As we confront a renewed assault from similar political and social forces, Blake’s work generously offers examples of how modes of protest can be located in an aesthetic and material practice.
Meticulous in presentation, tastefully arranged, and aesthetically restrained, the exhibition might initially pass for something more conservative. However, Blake’s work suggests a subtle yet radical alternative to the traditional reconciliation between meaning and form while refusing to provide us with a comforting didactic resolution. Rather, it opens a space where we too are asked to reevaluate the complicated politics surrounding the representation of identity in contemporary popular culture, and to recognize the contradictions of living in a time when representation often takes precedence over reality.

Share this article
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Mail
More stories by

Andrew Greene

Julien Creuzet’s Complex Work: Plastic Poetics, Landscapes, Hybridizations

25 May 2022, 2:29 pm CET

Born in 1986 in the suburbs of Paris, Julien Creuzet grew up in Martinique before returning to study in the…

Read More

For the Love of Doing Nothing: The bare minimum collective on Illness, Care, and Work

20 May 2022, 9:00 am CET

There may be no greater act of resistance to the worsening global crises of illness and exploitation than to stop…

Read More

Speculative Sunrise

11 May 2022, 9:00 am CET

In Los Angeles, we never really see the sunrise. Instead, there is a time when the sky lightens, but our…

Read More

Colin Self: On Shadows and Spotlights

4 May 2022, 9:00 am CET

Colin Self is a mutable creature. Born and raised in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, with the disarmingly friendly name…

Read More

  • Next

    Michael E. Smith Modern Art / London

  • Previous

    Nora Turato Serralves Museum / Porto

© 2022 Flash Art

  • Terms & conditions
  • Contact
  • Work with Us