Nancy Shaver
ElephantMag.com
Six Female Artists to See at Independent New York
Text by Emily Steer
Out of twenty-one solo presentations t Independent New York almost half are by women and there are notable dual female booths also. Some of the featured artists are just making their mark on the art world, while others have been practicing for numerous decades and are included at the fair as part of a group of works that look to the 1980s.
Nancy Shaver at Derek Eller Gallery, New York
Nancy Shaver collapses binary ideas that we often encounter in the art world – professional and amateur, items that have a practical use and those which do not – in a wide-reaching practice which has, over the years, included coordinating the work of multiple other artists, working with found objects and creating sculptures from a plethora of materials such as dress fab ric, household paint and cardboard boxes. True to her line of enquiry, the final works are difficult to place, holding formal qualities and a clean finish in some places, while also bearing traces of their less ceremonious roots. Her work will show alongside Despina Stokou, born in Athens, Greece in the late 70s, at Independent New York. Shaver was born in the late 40s in New York where she currently lives and works.
Independent New York runs from 2-5 March at Spring Studios, Tribeca.
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art agenda
The Armory Show and Independent Art Fair - by Brian Karl - March 3rd, 2017
VARIOUS LOCATIONS, New York
March 2–6, 2017
If the art auction is the ultimate hunger games of ostentatious display for your taste and bank account, the art fair is the auction’s suburban or exurban cousin: the mega shopping mall, where everything is under one roof. Whether or not you went in knowing what you wanted to get and what your individual sensibility might consist of, there is a tidal flow of people and things that overwhelms and cross-wires your brain toward shutdown.
(EXCERPT)
Better known now but still startling in their evocations, Nancy Shaver’s series of intricate combos of repurposed objets at New York’s Derek Eller loom in their small way like obsessively rearranged playthings that have the ineffable presence of a story half-told. Custom-made and colored blocks, rusted rebar bent to resemble sled runners, holders and footing for sculptures of commercial fabrics, partially folded but also wadded up and arrayed in patchwork create small tableaux with dark auras creeping out along the edges of the combined elements. Viewing each one is like being a stranger-guest sifting through the Christmas packages in somebody else’s home in another country. More....