3 December – 7 December, 2024
Exhibition
NADA Miami 2024
Spencer Brownstone Gallery
Booth E 100
Presenting Jane South and Shane Darwent.
Employing a diverse range of materials such as concrete, wood, fabrics, light fixtures, and paint, these artists have pioneered practices that engage with the poetics of space through the language of architecture. Jane South’s new body of work showcases a patchwork arrangement of thread, batting, fabric, and canvas. Evolved from the structured industrial sculptures of her earlier practice, South’s softer wall works are interlaced with the silhouettes of sidewalk grates, decorative fences, and rectangular windows. Seen from alternating perspectives, elements that appear flat subtly protrude, placing the work firmly between the two and three-dimensional. Shane Darwent’s awning forms features an isolated reconfiguration of the ubiquitous urban awnings which comprise the landscape of our commodity economy. Stripped of its commercial function above brick and mortar, the awnings series is a feat in artistic construction which emphasizes the interplay of light, space, and form.
Artist Bio
JANE SOUTH
With a background in architectural rendering and theater set design, Jane South (b. 1965, Manchester, UK) has long been engaged with human’s relationship to their architectural and urban surroundings. Currently resid- ing in Brooklyn, her practice is inspired by the shifting perspectives of the deteriorating cranes, cable terminals, and windowless warehouses which defined much of the borough in the waning years of its industrial history. Working across site-specific and sculptural installations, South’s studied career has seen the use of a wide-range of materials constructed as intimate wall works to towering architectural feats. Departing from her previous forms of meticulously cut and folded painted paper, South’s current sculptural works lie between the second and third dimensions; hard and soft, form and perceived function with the use of foam, quilting, painted canvas, and other fibrous materials. She has a BFA in Theater from Central St. Martins, London, UK, and an MFA in Painting & Sculpture from UNC Greensboro. Solo exhibitions include Halfway Off, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY; Switch Back, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY; Survey, Mills Gallery, Central College, Pella, IA; Floor/Ceiling, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; Box, Knoxville Museum of Art, TN and Shifting Structures: Stacks, the New York Public Library, NY. Selected group exhibitions include the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, NY; SLASH: Paper Under the Knife, Museum of Arts & Design, NY; Burgeoning Geometries: Construct- ed Abstractions, Whitney Museum of American Art, Altria; The Drawing Center, NY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA and the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD. Southʼs work has been reviewed in The New York Times, the LA Times, Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, New York Magazine, Frieze, ArtNews, NY Arts Magazine, and The New Yorker. She is a contributor to the book “The Artist as Cultural Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life” (editor: Sharon Louden). Grants and residencies include the Guggenheim Fellowship; Brown/RISD Mellon Foundation Fellowship; Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant; Dora Maar House, Menérbes, France; Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France; Pollock-Krasner Foundation; New York Foundation for the Arts; Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy; MacDowell Colony, NH; Yaddo, NY. In 2018 South was elected to the National Academy of Design. Jane South is currently Chair of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute.
SHANE DARWENT
Shane Darwent (b. 1983, Austin, TX) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice mines the commercial vernacular that lines American roadways to inform experimental photographic works, large-scale sculpture, and site-responsive installations. Within a landscape designed to overwhelm, Darwent’s practice seeks out a redacted formalism in order to meditate on the transitional nature of these spaces and the shape-shifting economic constructs of which they are a part. Exhibiting internationally, Darwent has been an artist-in-residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ragdale, the Ucross Foundation and the Jentel Artist Residency Program, as well as a Core Fellow at Penland School of Crafts. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Darwent’s work is included in the publication 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, by Thames & Hudson. Recent solo exhibitions include Light in the Way, Texas A&M University; Sun Smoke, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York City; Plaza Park, Boise State University; The Setting Stone, University of Tulsa; and Suburban Psalm, Spring Break Art Show, New York City. In 2022, Darwent was commissioned by Paris-based fashion house Saint Laurent to produce twenty-five, site specific sculptures for fifteen international storefront locations. He is a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow and is an artist-in-residence at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship in Tulsa, Oklahoma.