by Katie Cercone
featured image: High Chair, carved, painted and gilded wood, steel, 50 x 18 x 18in.
In my Creatrix article “In the Studio with Nancy Azara” published this past winter, I spoke to the prolific artist’s history as a pioneer of the Feminist Art movement in New York City as well as the way that her Italian-American ethnicity, interest in Eastern mysticism and rebellion against compulsory heterosexuality all inform her work. With an exhibition history in New York City spanning several decades, Nancy continues to generate provocative works in many mediums. Her show opening July 2nd at AIR premiers two large-scale sculptural works from her Woodstock studio – High Chair and Young Tree – along with six new collages and one print from her recent Crow and Sandal series. As a definitively mature body of work the show traverses the territory of death and self-mastery while tapping profoundly into otherworldly realms.
Spanning the many years of Azara’s creative practice we see hands and feet emerge as a distinct recurring motif. Hands suggesting human presence and healing, while feet offer a reflection of her spiritual inclinations to Hinduism and mystic traditions of the East. For Yogis, feet are a symbol of the guru personified. In this case, the artist has filled his shoes. In her focal point sculpture High Chair, the feet of the guru are pronounced, their prints carved and painted intimately by hand. A nod to the artist’s long-term study of Hinduism, a tradition in which the footprint of the guru is greatly revered, the piece and Nancy’s sculptural practice at large point to the body as vessel and vehicle of life. Through decades of seeking and embodied spiritual practice – Nancy has appointed herself as a veritable guru of her life. While the science of yoga continues to flourish in diverse communities the world over, and particularly here in the feministing West – many of the tradition’s renowned leaders have come under fire. As the rise of #MeToo reframes our relationship to “spiritual ego” and institutionalized abuse of male religious power, in many ways, we’re collectively experiencing the end of the guru and the beginning of horizontal power structures that enable shared authority. In this light, High Chair invokes a living spiritual tradition whilst simultaneously offering a gesture of reclamation, self-mastery and truth.
Meanwhile, Azara’s latest series of works on paper embraces mortality as emotional outward bound. The abstracted Crow and Sandal collages, strewn with symbolism and flourishes of the hand, are filtered through a recent near death experience the artist went through, in this set of small collages on paper emerges the crone aspect of the triple Goddess like never before. Flying into unknown wildernesses and jet black nights, the crow serves as a symbolic messenger between worlds. Within the Hindu pantheon, crows represents spirituality. Rendered in a fashion which involves hyper tactile techniques including rubbing, cutting, pasting and scraping – each page is marred by smears and residues of imperfect human touch. The curious black winged ones strewn across the page are in flux, misshapen or obscured in places. Even then they are ribboned with hints of gold and a translucence achieved by layers of parchment paper. In these carefully rendered, almost painterly Crow and Sandal compositions, the sandal returns baring its close relationship in Hinduism to the feet and footprint of the guru. In this collage series about near death, the sandal connotes the ultimate realization of the spiritual – the artist’s own infinite attempt to examine and suspend her power in time and space.
After a year like 2020, it feels essential to comb through our Western refusal to face death and make sense of the great forces of disarray, dissolution and disenchantment that have taken hold across the globe. Nancy compares our current COVID-19 pandemic to The Black Plague of the Middle Ages which birthed the Renaissance. During a period in which large amounts of the population died of the plague, the middle and lower classes rose up to revolt against the rich. Masks were also worn during such earlier plagues, often fashioned with big beaks that could be stuffed with preventative herbal remedies. Enter Azara’s mercurial crow figures, beaked, wings askance, standing or upside down; Azara’s crow as messenger of the crossroads is abstracted into the deep abyss. As a type of metaphysical self-portrait, for Azara the lesson learned from the messenger crow is one of survival and letting go – at the same time, the creature is a harbinger of an alternate reality, perhaps, a portal to the other side.
Please join artist Nancy Azara for the opening reception of High Chair and Other Works Friday July 2nd, 12-6pm
A.I.R. Gallery 155 Plymouth St, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Exhibition runs July 2 – August 1st 2021 – Gallery hours: Wed – Sun, 12-6pm
Full Press Release here
Learn more about Nancy’s work at NancyAzara.com
Follow the artist on Instagram @azaranancy
Katie Cercone *Or Nah* is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, scribe, yogi and spiritual gangsta. Cercone has been included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Whitney Museum, Dallas Contemporary and C24 Gallery. She has published critical writing in ART PAPERS, White Hot, Posture, Brooklyn Rail, Hysteria, Bitch Magazine, Art511, Utne Reader and N.Paradoxa. She is co-leader of the queer, transnational feminist collective Go! Push Pops and creative director of ULTRACULTURAL OTHERS Urban Mystery Skool. Cercone was a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for the U.S.-Japan Exchange Program in Tokyo. Follow her on instagram @0r__Nah_spiriturlgangsta and learn more at KatieCercone.com
