Holding Pattern
March 8 – April 29, 2022
Curated by Nick Larsen
To put it plainly, Holding Pattern brings together artists working with multiple kinds of compositions simultaneously. Inspired initially by the pattern poems of Rabanus Maurus, a ninth-century Benedictine monk, theologian, and encyclopedist, the exhibition—like Maurus’s well-known De laudibus sanctae crucis works—reveals itself in layers depending on the compositional structure one keys into, the direction one takes when navigating the space, and whether one is looking or reading or both.
At first glance, I was struck by how contemporary Maurus’s 1200-year-old poem drawings felt. In looking further, it became clear that what I was recognizing was a way of thinking and making visible in a lot of the artists’ work that I love today. The poems, like many of the works in the exhibition, have a literary organization and a visual organization, and those modes are inextricably linked, two frequencies buzzing in tandem. As signifier and signified become entangled and compositional elements begin to slip, letterforms may read as non-representational shapes or come into focus as words with understood meanings. Geometric structures might organize a visual plane or disrupt a poetic cadence, narrative, or landscape. Repetitive marks might coalesce, like a murmuration of starlings, into a new form only legible at a distance.
While the scale and materiality of the works in the exhibition vary greatly, a number of formal, aesthetic, and process throughlines emerge: textiles and references to domestic textile objects; collage and found imagery/text; camouflage and floral pattern references to landscape; codes, symbol vocabularies, and words as both images and things (and more, if you’re looking for them). As an exhibition, the goal for Holding Pattern was to mirror and amplify the textual, visual, and material interplay within the works in the space itself, an installation as meta-poem and vice versa.
Featuring works by Chris Duncan, Nick Fagan, Hasler Gomez, Kara Gut, Ann Hamilton, Alicia Little, Alex Lucas, Cat Mailloux, Julia Schwadron Marianelli, Michael Mercil, William J. O’Brien, Hannah Parrett, Austin Pratt, Emily Manalo Ruiz, Dean Smith, Jared Stanley, and Ryland Wharton.
Nick Larsen is an artist living in Columbus, Ohio. He studied at the University of Nevada, Reno and the Ohio State University, where he received his MFA in Sculpture. Larsen has had over a dozen solo and collaborative exhibitions and been a part of numerous notable group exhibitions, including Tilting the Basin, a survey of contemporary art in Nevada (Nevada Museum of Art, 2016), and several editions of New American Paintings (NAP #131, #135, #143, #155). In 2019, he self-published a book of images, drawings, and writing that straddled the line between autobiography and fictionalized archeological inventory of Queer Mountain, a real though poorly documented desert wilderness in western Nevada.
Photo Album | WATCH: HP Galleries Artist Talk – Nick Larsen with Kara Güt
This exhibition is part of the 2022 Curator Series which is supported in part by Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
