Undercurrent is pleased to announce Nick Fagan’s first New York solo show, The Moving Spirit or An Appreciation of Labor. According to the artist, his work is a material reaction to his experiences with mental health, disability, religion, and labor. The result is wide-spanning, unexpected, serious, and funny; it creates a tornado-style penetrating path not only into the artist’s mind but also slices through contemporary obsessions such as banality, spirituality, abstraction of language and symbols, formal hermeticism, openness, playfulness, ritual and transformation, class and religion, sexuality and synthetic duality of masculinity in particular.
A unifying single physical element in this show is the used mover’s blanket. In the artist’s vision, the simple everyday object is elevated into a piece of art as in the Cinderella fairy tale, without losing its humble blue-collar origins. The blankets come in different colors and some variations can be found in their patterns, but apart from that, they are pretty much the same standardized industrial products, without individuality. However, as used moving blankets, physical traces of sweat, stain, and tears suggest spiritual transformation similar to the shroud of Turin, from trashy to the divine.
The Moving Spirit or An Appreciation of Labor consists of eleven wall pieces. The main gallery presents seven large tapestries; the definition is preferred by the artist for pictorial and spiritual reasons and allusions. European tapestries were objectified paintings, simultaneously expensive time-consuming multi-team decorative productions similar to Persian carpets, but depicting important events of the day comparable to Pixar / animated films of today. Nick Fagan’s tapestries are visually abstract, but they are not passive decorations-they are almost aggressions. They have the aura and importance of mythological grand themes of the renaissance and baroque. The feeling is eerily similar to Abstract Expressionism’s choice of existential themes interspersed with funky Dadaist echos as tiny devils gliding and viciously squirming around the artist in the inner sanctum previously occupied by myth paintings. His work is grounded in drawing practices and in sculptural processes of subtraction and addition, and fondness of found objects with already embedded spirit.
The largest work, Vessel and Eucharist, is placed on the floor. As the title implies, it encapsulates the spirit of this show and transforms the space into the mental ritual ground. In the context of Undercurrent’s basement, the location can be an allusion to roman catacombs and invokes the mystery of cave temples. The other tapestries echo and reinforce the main theme:
Gilded Break
The Workers Dilemma
Wave
Gilded Union
Employment Data
Phallic
Fagan’s large tapestries are ambitious creations sewn from many used moving blankets and visually can appear similar to traditional quilts. But the heroic masculinity-induced contradictions don’t connect with the community and tradition-based quilt circles. The materials that Fagan uses to create his works are essentially devoid of the character prior to use, but their accrued history - evocative of heavy lifting - is evidenced through their wear and tear.
The size and verticality of Fagan’s tapestries evoke the royal and majestic; although his work tips its hat to figurative master narratives and pattern, it upends tapestry’s grandiose manner in its use of cartoon-like flaccid shapes.
Several other pieces in the show are similar in content:
Germs
Beyond Surface
Community Breakdown
Modernism
but they are not tapestries. They are different combinations of shaped panels; in this case, the used moving blankets are stretched in place of canvas, supplanting the art they usually protect.
Beyond the physical boundaries, The Moving Spirit or An Appreciation of Labor creates a new world, and a common history is revealed to the larger public through the artist’s use of personal history.
PROMO IMAGE: Rosary and Gilded Union. Nick Fagan’s studio in Richmond, Virginia.
IMAGE I: The Workers Dilemma, 2020. 88 x 106 x 0.5 inches. Hand sewn used moving blankets IMAGE II: Vessel and Eucharist, 2020. 89.9 x 135 x 0.5 inches. Hand sewn used moving blankets
