Nancy Shaver and Emi Winter

 

PARKER GALLERY

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"Gathering texture, following shape" featured Nancy Shaver's sculptures and Emi Winter's woven rugs and paintings.  While the works' vocabularies did not always rhyme, their joint installation set up a visual call-and-response that made itself at  home in the many rooms of the Parker Gallery, located in a house.  Both artists also share a sympathy for what Shaver has called "collective history," perhaps more broadly understood as the lives and works of others, and the circumstances of their coming together.

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One especially eloquent room contained Shaver's sandbox-like Blue Pool, 2018,  a horizontal trough in an optimistic shade of turquoise that contained an organized grid of stacked wooden blocks wrapped in T-shirts and other found fabrics.  The aggregation's logic of ludic mutability extended to her nearby iterations of Sentinel, all 2018 - each a figurine in a different state of legibility, and each insistently vertical, with an upright base of one or two anthropomorphic legs - which she arranged into a coterie of six spirits set on the room's fireplace.  Facing outward, they reigned over Winter's wool carpets, Zapotec Cut-Outs VII  and Zapotec Cut-Outs X, both 2014: trompe l'oeil fields of fragments convincingly excerpted or layered within a tight weave.  On the wall nearest to Blue Pool  hung Winter's Scissors and Roses (yellow), 2018, its minty background softening the image of elongated blades slicing buds from their stems.  ...more