AMY NATHAN

Artist in RESIDENCE: OBJECTS AS HANDWRITING

This body of work references small mechanisms that are everyday connectors and disrupters. Paper clips, noisemakers, saw blades, fishing weights, heating coils, locks, straps, and ropes operate like letterforms to write an idea into the space. These are objects that bend towards bodies and language, as a word leans towards the thing itself, without inhabiting its exact likeness.

Amy Nathan explores the relationship between representation and reality in her multifaceted drawing, sculpture, and installation-based practice. She asks questions about how meaning can be expressed through visual languages, guided by ideas such as the gendered nature of politics and power, classical mythology and contemporary literature, and the body’s visceral reaction to its environment. 

Nathan holds a MFA from Mills College, and she was a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Nathan’s work has been exhibited at CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Traywick Contemporary, Art Toronto, Facebook, Art Market San Francisco, Intersect Aspen, and with the International Sculpture Center at Pyramid Hill Museum. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Art Maze Magazine, New American Paintings and Sculpture Magazine, and featured on Juxtapoz. Her recent solo exhibition with CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions was reviewed as a “Critic’s Pick” in Artforum, in which Emily Wilson noted, “Though their references are as wide-ranging as their forms, Nathan’s works exhibit a playful hand adept at using symbols to tell some of the oldest but still urgent stories of human relations.”

Our thanks to CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions for helping to make this remote residency possible!