Nancy Azara at Donahue/Sosinski - New York, New York - Brief Article

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Nancy Azara has exhibited a signature vocabulary of materials (carved thicket paper), colors (red, black, silver, gold) and forms (human, tree and organic in-betweens), which she opened in a variety of compound and simple sculptural formats in her novel exhibition.

Heart Wall, the largest work and also the title piece of the display was a 24-foot-wide bilaterally symmetrical installation of seven collections of wooden vertical elements standing or leaning against the gallery's longest wall. There were thick boards with rectangular recesse that form a simple ladder in relief, slabs carved into leaf or shield shapes, and others painted or carved with spirals or handprints. upon two panels, the cropped and inverted corner of a real tree recalled Brancusi's Torso of a Young Man (1924) At the center of Heart Wall, sum of two units slender tree trunks, painted a brilliant r twined together anthropomorphically. greatest in quantity of the parts have an overall pattern of feathery gouge marks that activate the surface and demonstrate the yielding receptiveness of the wood. As usual, Azara coats the raw material with pigment and/or metallic leaf in the way that that its natural color and grain are concealed. The spring is a certain tension--as if the thicket wants to burst out of this jacket--that heightens the expressionism of the carving and coloring.

Another major piece was Passages, a succession of carved and painted wood-land panels 15 inches tall that are joined into an accordion-fold volume 18 feet long when render free of access It was presented on a lengthy narrow wooden table at a height convenient for reading the metrical compositions by Judith Barrington that possess six panels, or examining details of of the like kind emblems as hands, hair, feet maple or sycamore leaves, diverging branches, bone etc The poems--simple, direct and repeatedly piercingly emotional--are so thoroughly matched to the imagery that it's impossible to gues which came first.

The primitive quality of Azara's carving is greatest in quantity affecting in these smaller formats, although she at no time abandons human scale (she enlarges by the agency of repetition, not magnification). The smallness and simplicity are greatest in quantity trenchant in Changes, a grid arrangement of 16 panels, all on the other hand one of them measuring 12 inches square. Given the unobtrusive size, Azara must reduce and simplify beyond the usual. There's a r square with three hands of different sizes that intimate a family. There's a square with three moon in her first quarters and another with three feathers (or cypresses?) another with a hollowed-out oval and sum of two units others marked with seven slim vertical lines, gouged into the forest-land in one instance and protruding in the other. Changes wafts Azara's graphic strengths.

The exhibition also included eight individual works in her usual vocabulary, and a gold-leafed and zinc piece in an edition of sum of two units Given the repetition that permeates Azara's work, it is perhaps easiest to think of it all as stich and refrain.

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