Exhibition
Mira Dayal
Steel Model of Paper Copy of Desk Top with Pencil Groove
March 8 - April 26, 2025
Opening Saturday, March 8th, 6-8pm
Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to present Steel Model of Paper Copy of Desk Top with Pencil Groove, Mira Dayal’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features an array of objects that explore the materiality of language and the physical and social conditions of its production.
The space is symmetrically plotted with steel sculptures. Some feature familiar shapes while others remain enigmatic. Their material composition and the particulars of their forms signal function. Together with the industrial architecture of the space, they evoke the metal shop, the production floor, or the surface of a worker’s desk—spaces where ideas are physically manifested through labor and craft.
Most individual works in the gallery refer to objects intended for a single user, or the I of the writing voice, but many direct our attention to the spatial and relational qualities of language, tools, and sculpture. A message is addressed to a receiver. A process requires two artists’ hands. An object is transported to someone across a great distance. A map is offered to the viewer. And these tools and their environments inevitably inform the production itself. The view from a desk positioned in front of a window, and the domestic life around it, shapes the activity on the page.
Dayal’s processes emphasize the human scale by translating the complex repetitions of industrial mass production into the laborious, step-by-step problem-solving of an individual artist producing an individual sculpture. The works’ titles highlight this idea through use of strings of operations: … [of] … [of] … [with] … [without] … suggests an equation where objects are continuously divided by, subtracted from, and attached to each other. Variables multiply to become something larger. The works themselves contain traces of these operations over time—including rust, mechanical marks, and affordances from a source object’s design.
Across Steel Model of Paper Copy of Desk Top with Pencil Groove, unstable surfaces and segmented forms gesture to the instability of language—often ephemeral, increasingly machine-driven—while emphasizing its rootedness in social and material worlds.
Artist Bio
Mira Dayal is an artist, writer, and editor based in New York. She produces systems of sculptures that often respond to a site's architecture or history; involve subtle but laborious uses of everyday objects and materials; critically reflect on changing technologies; and push against the limits of language and image. Dayal has held solo and two-person exhibitions at venues including Fuller Rosen Gallery, Philadelphia; Princeton University, NJ; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; Kunstverein Dresden, Germany; Gymnasium, Brooklyn; Lubov, New York; NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; and Abrons Art Center, New York. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Feral File; Barnard College, New York; Miriam, Brooklyn; lower_cavity, Holyoke, MA; Parent Company, Brooklyn; Apparatus Projects, Chicago; Artspace New Haven, CT; OCHI, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; NURTUREart, Brooklyn; and other spaces. She has participated in residencies at Ox-Bow, Art in General, and A.I.R. Gallery. Dayal is on faculty at Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts.