Croy Nielsen

Nina Beier

10 Jan - 22 Feb 2014

© Nina Beier
Scheme, 2014
Online organic vegetable box scheme, delivered to the gallery at timed intervals, Dimensions variable
NINA BEIER
Office Nature Body Pattern
10 January - 22 February 2014

The title of Nina Beier’s second show at Croy Nielsen is conceived with the help of an Online keyword generator devised to assist stock photographers in tagging their images with easily graspable labels. A pair of frames feature patterns not as we usually encounter them, but rather made up of actual objects: neckties, clocks, foxtail key rings, scissors, and leggings with an imitation of marble printed upon them. Like stock imagery, these patterns teeter on the edge between deep symbolism and an emptiness of meaning.

A pair of Hermes ties in Beier’s Office Nature Nobody Pattern, 2014 feature images ofvegetables. Beier has contracted the gallery into several local Vegetable Box Schemes that will deliver fresh produce to the exhibition. When committing to such an enterprise, one automates their choice of sustenance, finding a simplified pathway through anabundance of options. While the schemes tie the customers to the seasons without getting their hands dirty, the neckties are subject to a distinct logic of their own fashion seasons, yet are still regarded as timeless.

A work produced in collaboration with Simon Dybbroe Møller features grow lights radiating pairs of office plants from a defunct bank, rescued and nurtured in an eternal summer. Gallery spaces and bank offices equally bask in the glow of an artificial and unchanging day, all operating under the conception of infinite growth. The bank learned firsthand the folly of this ideology, eventually collapsing in economic downturn, with the plants put on auction to desperately recoup the losses. The plants, a supplemental means of naturalizing the bank that runs against the logic of the bank’s abstract procedures, become survivors.

The desire to be permanent can be found also in three pairs of marble-printed leggings, rendering the wearer a sculpture, everlasting. But as the accumulations of vegetables begin to wrinkle – we stand face to face with the physical inevitability of the world we live in.

Post Brothers 2014
 

Tags: Nina Beier, Simon Dybbroe Møller