TARO NASU is pleased to announce Nancy Holt’s solo exhibition.
Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was at the heart of the network of artists who were rethinking the possibilities of art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was a member of the Earth, Land, and Conceptual art movements, and an innovator of site-specific installation and moving image work. Throughout her artistic practice, language and systems of perception were key concerns. Holt’s earliest artworks were concrete poems, and many of her film and video works focus on communication, interpretation, and the subjectivity of language. TARO NASU presents three works demonstrating Holt’s involvement in the New York downtown scene.
Points of View (1974) was made for the Clocktower Gallery in New York. Each of the four monitors is set to the circular windows of this iconic New York exhibition space, which look out to cardinal axes of the compass. The screens show four views of Lower Manhattan seen from each window accompanied by individual soundtracks of dialogues that, literally and conceptually, demonstrate different points of view. In the pairings Lucy Lippard talks with Richard Serra, Liza Béar with Klaus Kertess, Carl Andre with Ruth Kligman, and Bruce Boice with Tina Girouard about what can be seen through respectively the north, south, east, and west windows. As suggested by the title, Points of View underlines the subjectivity and fallibility of observation and communication. This process is expanded through time and space as we watch and hear these descriptions from Holt’s artist and writer friends in a different city nearly a half-century later.
Throughout her work Holt was interested not only on what we see, but how we see. This interest in framing vision and making words material led her to explore the productive miscommunications that occur when information is imperfectly transferred from one medium to another. The four screen video installation Points of View exemplifies this experiment, revealing–as she notes in her journal–“the wonder of place through verbal description.”
About Nancy Holt
Holt/Smithson Foundation works with Sprüth Magers to develop Holt’s unique and influential legacy, and this exhibition at TARO NASU has been developed in partnership with Sprüth Magers.
This year the most expansive survey exhibition and publication of Holt’s work, Nancy Holt/Inside Outside, launched at Bildmuseet (Umeå, Sweden), developed in cooperation with MACBA (Barcelona, Spain) who will present the exhibition in summer 2023. Currently Sprüth Magers Los Angeles is presenting the solo exhibition Nancy Holt: Locating Perception, and Holt’s work is included in the group exhibition Ecstatic Land at Ballroom Marfa, Texas. Previous solo exhibitions include ehe retrospective Nancy Holt: Sightlines, which traveled between 2010 and 2012 from the Wallach Art Gallery (Columbia University, New York) to five venues; in 2021 at Western Washington University and University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; Dia Art Foundation, New York City in 2018; and in 2013 Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Holt’s work is held in major collections including Dia Art Foundation; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Gegenswartkunst, Germany; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Works by Holt are permanently installed at public institutions including Miami University Art Museum, Ohio; University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; Western Washington University; and University of South Florida.
About Holt/Smithson Foundation
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson transformed the world of art and ideas. Holt/Smithson Foundation develops the artists’ distinctive creative legacies. Holt and Smithson recalibrated the limits of art, changing what art can be and where art can be found. Their art, writings, and ideas built the ground from which contemporary art has grown. Collaborating with artists, writers, thinkers, and institutions Holt/Smithson Foundation realizes exhibitions, publishes books, initiates artist commissions, programs educational events, encourages research, and develops collections and collaborations globally from its headquarters in New Mexico. Holt/Smithson Foundation was willed into being by Nancy Holt in 2014. Holt/Smithson Foundation plans to terminate in 2038, a century after Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Smithson (1938-1973) were born.
www. holtsmithsonfoundation.org
