Nash Glynn
The Future is Fiction
19 May - 30 Jun 2019
NASH GLYNN
The Future is Fiction
19 May – 30 June 2019
I don't think Nature was ever natural. —Nash Glynn
From May 19 – June 30, 2019, PARTICIPANT INC presents Nash Glynn, The Future is Fiction, the artist’s first New York solo exhibition. Comprised of paintings, drawings, videos, and photography, in each Glynn uses her body as a medium to interrogate categories such as nature, female, human. Through self-portraiture, Glynn places the transfeminine form in relation to rapidly changing ecologies, positing climate change not only as a problem of representation, but also as a threat to essentialist gender ideologies. As artist and writer Aliza Shvarts notes, Glynn deploys self-representation as “signifier at a geological scale in the contemporary context of climate change, ecological disaster, and mass extinctions of the Anthropocene. Through self-portraiture, digital manipulation, and extra-planetary imagination, Glynn poses the trans female body as a metaphor for the contradictions of nature and culture. Working through ideas of utopia and dystopia, industry and intimacy, seduction and ruin, she uses techniques such as photomontage to blend the artificial and the real. These cohesive environments ask the viewer to consider the fate of the body, the planet, and the representational capacities of the artist beyond the framework of humanism”(The Archive Spring 2018, Issue 63).
"As a source of history, She speaks to the alignment of the Earth to a living human body, with breath, blood, sweat and the possibility of regeneration or annihilation. The ongoing series of video performances, Lover Earth (2014-18) seeks to diagnose our current ecological crisis as always embedded within a body politics at the heart of the rationalization of domination of people and the planet" (Glynn). In response to this crisis, Glynn’s drag persona Lover Earth, rendered as both figure and landscape, says, “YOU USED ME.” In a traditional Western depiction, this alignment of Earth and the female body affirms a dualistic logic of domination at the root of biological essentialism as well as environmental colonization. Lover Earth functions as an aesthetic tool with which to speak of an environmental politics without reproducing nature as a weapon of oppression, which Glynn distributes through ubiquitous platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo.
In formative works such as Mars Terraformation — Phase I and Phase II (2019), the artist’s body again serves as a substitute for a planet, submitting to processes whereby an atmosphere hostile toward humans is made habitable. Based upon terraformation proposals put forward by NASA, in "Phase I" hydrogen bombs are deployed onto Mars, a planet too cold for humans. Hypothetically, because of Mars' thin atmosphere, over a period of approximately 1000 years the radiation would heat the planet. In "Phase II," carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere to create a greenhouse gas effect and further heat the planet. “Mars” in transition becomes greener, the sky is blue, and we can see ourselves in the landscape. Here, objects designed for the annihilation of life on Earth are used to foster it on Mars. In Glynn’s earliest work on view, Before & After (Self Portrait, Split Zombie) (2016), the figure of the zombie becomes a stand-in for climate change — both being potential results of ecological and/or biological contagion. In this case, in which the figure of the zombie occupies a queer position, the undeads’ threat to normativity is further compounded.
The Future is Fiction flows through Glynn’s personifications of seemingly neutral historical categories. The artist’s painted self-portraits place the figure within landscapes and interior spaces, interrogating an inside/outside logic. This superimposition seeks to ask what it means to be within a biosphere or a body. The exhibition traverses the seasons from winter to spring, and the terrains of Earth and Mars. Throughout the space of the exhibition, traces of fake blood can be found — written on the wall, leaking from an outlet. An ode to Carolee Schneemann, who used menstrual blood as a material of female experience, Glynn’s artificial blood extends that gesture forward, navigating a topography of problems and pleasures. As objects and images that look back on history, Glynn’s works intervene into dominant art historical narratives that maintain rituals of exclusion. Within this frame, the possibilities for self-determination, reflection, and manipulation become inexhaustible. The result is a hall of contradictions.
Nash Glynn (b. 1992) is a transdisciplinary artist living in New York City and Miami. Glynn’s work has been included in group exhibitions and screenings including those at Judson Memorial Church, NY; The Leslie-Lohman Museum, NY; Marinara Gallery, NY; Yours Mine and Ours, NY; Raumerweiterungshalle, Berlin; Distillery Gallery, Boston, MA; Filmhuis Cavia, Amsterdam; and MIX NYC, NY Queer Experimental Film Festival. Glynn is the recipient of the 2017 Leslie-Lohman Museum Queer Artist Fellowship. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2017, and BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 2014.
The Future is Fiction
19 May – 30 June 2019
I don't think Nature was ever natural. —Nash Glynn
From May 19 – June 30, 2019, PARTICIPANT INC presents Nash Glynn, The Future is Fiction, the artist’s first New York solo exhibition. Comprised of paintings, drawings, videos, and photography, in each Glynn uses her body as a medium to interrogate categories such as nature, female, human. Through self-portraiture, Glynn places the transfeminine form in relation to rapidly changing ecologies, positing climate change not only as a problem of representation, but also as a threat to essentialist gender ideologies. As artist and writer Aliza Shvarts notes, Glynn deploys self-representation as “signifier at a geological scale in the contemporary context of climate change, ecological disaster, and mass extinctions of the Anthropocene. Through self-portraiture, digital manipulation, and extra-planetary imagination, Glynn poses the trans female body as a metaphor for the contradictions of nature and culture. Working through ideas of utopia and dystopia, industry and intimacy, seduction and ruin, she uses techniques such as photomontage to blend the artificial and the real. These cohesive environments ask the viewer to consider the fate of the body, the planet, and the representational capacities of the artist beyond the framework of humanism”(The Archive Spring 2018, Issue 63).
"As a source of history, She speaks to the alignment of the Earth to a living human body, with breath, blood, sweat and the possibility of regeneration or annihilation. The ongoing series of video performances, Lover Earth (2014-18) seeks to diagnose our current ecological crisis as always embedded within a body politics at the heart of the rationalization of domination of people and the planet" (Glynn). In response to this crisis, Glynn’s drag persona Lover Earth, rendered as both figure and landscape, says, “YOU USED ME.” In a traditional Western depiction, this alignment of Earth and the female body affirms a dualistic logic of domination at the root of biological essentialism as well as environmental colonization. Lover Earth functions as an aesthetic tool with which to speak of an environmental politics without reproducing nature as a weapon of oppression, which Glynn distributes through ubiquitous platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo.
In formative works such as Mars Terraformation — Phase I and Phase II (2019), the artist’s body again serves as a substitute for a planet, submitting to processes whereby an atmosphere hostile toward humans is made habitable. Based upon terraformation proposals put forward by NASA, in "Phase I" hydrogen bombs are deployed onto Mars, a planet too cold for humans. Hypothetically, because of Mars' thin atmosphere, over a period of approximately 1000 years the radiation would heat the planet. In "Phase II," carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere to create a greenhouse gas effect and further heat the planet. “Mars” in transition becomes greener, the sky is blue, and we can see ourselves in the landscape. Here, objects designed for the annihilation of life on Earth are used to foster it on Mars. In Glynn’s earliest work on view, Before & After (Self Portrait, Split Zombie) (2016), the figure of the zombie becomes a stand-in for climate change — both being potential results of ecological and/or biological contagion. In this case, in which the figure of the zombie occupies a queer position, the undeads’ threat to normativity is further compounded.
The Future is Fiction flows through Glynn’s personifications of seemingly neutral historical categories. The artist’s painted self-portraits place the figure within landscapes and interior spaces, interrogating an inside/outside logic. This superimposition seeks to ask what it means to be within a biosphere or a body. The exhibition traverses the seasons from winter to spring, and the terrains of Earth and Mars. Throughout the space of the exhibition, traces of fake blood can be found — written on the wall, leaking from an outlet. An ode to Carolee Schneemann, who used menstrual blood as a material of female experience, Glynn’s artificial blood extends that gesture forward, navigating a topography of problems and pleasures. As objects and images that look back on history, Glynn’s works intervene into dominant art historical narratives that maintain rituals of exclusion. Within this frame, the possibilities for self-determination, reflection, and manipulation become inexhaustible. The result is a hall of contradictions.
Nash Glynn (b. 1992) is a transdisciplinary artist living in New York City and Miami. Glynn’s work has been included in group exhibitions and screenings including those at Judson Memorial Church, NY; The Leslie-Lohman Museum, NY; Marinara Gallery, NY; Yours Mine and Ours, NY; Raumerweiterungshalle, Berlin; Distillery Gallery, Boston, MA; Filmhuis Cavia, Amsterdam; and MIX NYC, NY Queer Experimental Film Festival. Glynn is the recipient of the 2017 Leslie-Lohman Museum Queer Artist Fellowship. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2017, and BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 2014.