BIO

Nana Wolke explores the nature of perception, focusing her attention on modes of apprehension of space and time. Her series of works usually begins on film-like sets, where the artist records the unfolding of staged situations and improvised actions occurring in spaces spanning across the social hierarchy. Wolke proceeds to assemble and edit both original and found footage to create distinctly monochromatic visual atmospheres and rhythms that she then translates into painting and sound installations. Using commonplace lighting to model space and generate the grain, textures and slippages of her images and sequences, Wolke utilizes a variety of devices chosen as much for their technical properties as for their social significance, e.g., CCTV equipment, home video camcorders, inventory cameras, intercom systems, and so on. Considering the multiple viewpoints from which an action can be witnessed, Wolke’s work conjures a tension between observation and control, often inviting viewers to navigate environments that interrogate notions of access and inclusion – whether for economic, social, or security purposes. In so doing, Wolke reflects upon the conflation of desire and shame in contemporary modes of the production and consumption of images and visual culture. By constantly confronting the logic of live actions, cinema, and paint, Wolke ultimately seeks to analyze the progressive inextricability between actual and artificial realities.

WORK AT THE EXHIBITION

Blind Spot, 2024
installation composed of:
Wooden Eye, 2024
aluminum, wood, light and AV equipment playing a sound recording
00:22:37,925 – – > 00:30:55,375 (Tempo), 2024
oil and construction sand on linen
00:09:31,275 – – > 00:11:56,900 (Hook), 2024
oil and construction sand on linen

No longer a marker of privilege and the social elite, the spread of private security equipment reflects not only a desire for safety and comfort but also a wider desire to curate reality, seen as much in the post-pandemic resurgence of exclusive spaces and members’ clubs, as in the sprawling network of subtly integrated cameras mediating (and surveilling) our existence. Comprising a sound installation and a series of paintings, Nana Wolke’s presentation examines contemporary definitions of access, exclusivity and inclusion by observing the entrance and interior of a building in downtown New York. These ideas are explored through an aluminum fence comprising intercom speakers leaking sound coming from inside the apartment, evoking a threshold between private and public spheres, the visible and the hidden, as well as our desire to live in sheltered environments in which reality can be edited at will. Accompanied by paintings based on photographs capturing eclectic young people at the building’s entrance, Wolke’s presentation invites us to navigate a space we may not have access to, building tensions between performance and voyeurism while musing on ideas of value, spectatorship and social hierarchy.