The heart of N. Dash’s multifaceted practice, which incorporates working methods from painting, sculpture, photography, and printmaking, contains a seeming paradox: The work is simultaneously refined and abject, involving the transformation of humble materials—dirt, jute, string, strips of styrofoam, plastic bottles, cast-off cardboard—into complex compositions made with a startling economy of means. An animating force behind these constructions is Dash’s connection to the environment, both natural and constructed, and to geologic time—the vast interval during which biological life on earth came into being. Integral to the work is an underlying tension between the industrially “given” and the handmade, and between the unpredictability of nature and the elements and human attempts to alter or tame these potent energies.
