NICOLE WERMERS: GIVERS & TAKERS: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present Givers & Takers, Nicole Wermers' third solo exhibition at the gallery and first solo show since the artist's recent presentation at Tramway, Glasgow, as a 2015 Turner Prize nominee. On view June 1 – July 15, 2016, the current gallery exhibition features three new series of floor and wall-based sculptures: Vertical Awnings, Givers & Takers, and Mood Boards, which continue Wermer’s exploration of how various materials produce and define urban space. Combining and reconfiguring familiar objects into new material forms, Wermers addresses the structures of ritualised social relations and the material objects through which these associations are communicated. These works transform, contain, and frame their environment, prompting a deeper consideration of how surface and design read as social and cultural indicators.

Populating the downstairs gallery, Wermers’ Vertical Awning series is comprised of "assisted readymades," rolled-up retractable awnings redesigned with custom fabrics and turned on their side. These floor-based works articulate how soft materials, particularly textiles, divide, appropriate, privatize, shade, domesticate and protect public space. Wermers addresses the use of textiles for these purposes as having equally to do with their material properties of being flexible and our perception of them as unthreatening. Although each awning could cover up to nine square meters at full extension, they are displayed with the material completely rolled up and compactly displayed as vertical, columnar shapes, recalling Wermers earlier Kusine series and referencing the Modernist legacy of Brancusi’s Endless Column. However, rather than dealing with space as an abstract concept, Vertical Awnings addresses space as a commodity that is constantly re-defined and allocated.

Accompanying these works is Wermers’ series of wall-based sculptures entitled Givers & Takers, which combines models of domestic stainless steel ventilation fans with hand dryers found in public restrooms. While the fans are readymade, the hand dryers are scaled up and inverted to underscore the balance between public and private space and their counteractive functions: one is designed to extract air from a room and the other to generate it. Void of any connection to electricity or ventilation circuit, their juxtaposition emphasizes their formal properties and how they relate to the noisy yet invisible functions, now obsolete. The two objects at once service and negate each other. Giving further consideration to the contradictions inherent in modern design, Wermers chooses kitchen fans constructed of thin, inexpensive materials made to look like sleek stainless steel, volumetric imitations of strength and solidity. Similarly, the hand dryers boast suggestively powerful names like Vortex, Excelerator, Air blade, further highlighting the aspirational aspects of modern design aesthetics.