Practice: in Progress

About

Practice: in Progress brings together the work of 22 artists working at 201 46th street at NARS Foundation’s 4th and 2nd floor galleries. The artists, who have worked in this building anywhere from 2 months to 6 years, have continuous practices in which they experiment and explore different methods of making art through a variety of media, themes, techniques and interests. These actions, intuitions, creativity approaches and disciplines shape both the process and final results.

Process can be thought of as a path that one decides to undertake, one with a destiny that can be clear from the onset or otherwise unknown. Similarly, artists create paths when producing artwork; the layers are gradually exposed, the materials are made visible, and the relation between one another emerges and opens the door to the visions of the artists. The spectator is then able to trace the paths each one of them has explored to reach a final result. A constant metamorphosis that has lead to an equilibrium: from a thought, to a gesture, and then to another unexpected equilibrium. To create becomes something like a ceremony, an event that generates its own language, often coinciding with or becoming a general concern or the object of experimentation. 

Beyond the idea of exploring the processes that each artist has developed, the exhibition has taken two areas of primary focus, oscillating between identity and the act of being seen, and ones relationship to the environment and its surrounding social and political subjects. The objects presented in Practice: in Progress are like physical and mental layers of a creative process, building and growing, or otherwise being peeled back to reveal something that lies beyond the surface.