"Light Moves, Haunted Histories" Presentation at CAA Conference

On February 17, I will co-present at the 2017 College Art Association conference with artist and PhD candidate Catherine Czacki. The presentation, titled "Light Moves, Haunted Histories", will "investigate non-dominating (dis-possessive) arrangements of artistic and critical practice––as well as ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ approaches to thought in the realm of the small gesture. Catherine Czacki and Natalie Beall will introduce ideas about how objects resist or refuse interpretation and/or alternately reveal traces of their histories. This serves as a continuation to their conversation published in Possible Press––though with an open format for a more public dialogue. The original project consisted of image and text exchanges between the two artists on topics ranging from Walter Benjamin’s notions of the everyday, Jimmie Durham’s poetry about intrinsic material value, domestic materiality and the hauntings that emerge via the utility object rendered useless. The conversation will include images/objects relevant to Beall and Czacki’s practices."

The Lives of Forms at the Lower East Side Printshop

The Lives of Forms  
Curated by Ksenia Nouril  
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 26, 6-8pm    

Lower East Side Printshop; 306 W. 37th St., 6th Floor

On view May 26 - August 26, 2016    
 
This exhibition meditates on the tensions between figurative and abstract forms in the works of ten contemporary printmakers. The artists featured cull their forms from a variety of sources, from newspapers and magazines to high school yearbooks and personal archives. Old and new, popular and erudite, anonymous and recognizable, the multifarious forms that populate these works tell stories that have both local and global reach.
 
The title of this exhibition is inspired by La vie des forms or The Life of Forms in Art, a 1934 publication by French art historian Henri Focillon, one of the most prolific and poetic writers on the subject. It describes the ways forms make themselves known to us, revealing their meanings while constantly changing with the world around them. "We must never think of forms, in their different states, as simply suspended in some remote, abstract zone, above the earth and above [hu]man[s]. They mingle with life, whence they come; they translate into space certain movements of the mind."

Featuring work by:

Michael Adno

Silvina Arismendi

Natalie Beall

Alina Bliumis

Andrea Cauthen

Nina Feigin

Cooper Holoweski

Lindsay Packer

Felix Plaza