Nancy Shaver: Blockers, Spacers and Scribble Drawings

Nancy Shaver, Blockers, Spacers and Scribble Drawings
On view at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles through August 1.

By D.K. Sole

The top room at Parker Gallery is small, with a bay window. Through the glass you can see a field of houses jutting out of the hillside below the Griffith Observatory. Someone a way along is building a wooden structure and a man there is shooting a jet of hose water from a balcony into the air off the hillside.

Nancy Shaver installs her shows herself, they said, but this time she couldn’t make it from New York to L.A. and they did it over FaceTime. Her installation acknowledges the shape of the room so sensitively that the works look as if they were created on site (they weren’t) so they would know how to touch their square sprouts against the angles and the corners and the shallow indent to the right side of the window, where one of her flattish fabric-wrapped pieces known as “spacers” runs right and left until it presses against both sides of the wall. Is it a probe or a battering ram? An amoeba of large pixels, two of them green with cloverleaf cloth, one decorated with part of a pheasant on a bit of tufted rug, it gives you a reason to look at a part of the room that (glancing back through the “past exhibitions” section of the gallery’s website) doesn’t seem to have ever had anything hung on it before.

You remember the (many more than one) articles you’ve read in which someone says Shaver is in the business of flattening hierarchies and promoting what she once called in an interview with ArtNews “this idea about the democracy of things.” Now, thanks to her, the indent has joined the other parts of the room that have been filled. More spacers are clustered between the bottom of the window and the floor, and a group of five new pieces – scribble drawings on upright metal poles – stand in a cluster, four of them pointed towards you at face height. Then there are some of her short “sentinels,’ or fabric-wrapped panels mounted on stands, and assemblages of fabric-wrapped cubes, the “blockers.”

Shaver’s installations are often laid out along long walls, like patchwork murals that encourage you to stand back and take them in section by section, at a distance, but Blockers, Spacers and Scribble Drawings circles around you and advances like undergrowth across the limited amount of floor. The sentinels have claimed the area by the bases of the drawing poles. Shape #1 and Shape #2 is there at your feet, sending up a probe with a box on it.

The poles under the drawn-on sheets are kinked like turning necks, as if the drawings are looking out for something. The placement in front of a window emphasises that idea, even though most of them are aimed at you, not the scenery. You must be the thing they’re a bit wary of. Their faces are coloured pencil lines running to and fro on paper, cousins to the smaller cut-out patches of pastel-scribbled paper on some of her earlier works. They’re stuck to sheets of cardboard that look as if they’ve been ripped out of the sides of boxes. One has circles on it as though she’s drawn over the bottom of a box that had been manufactured with round indents to receive rows of tins.

How does she present her materials, these drawings, these swatches of fabric on the spacers and sentinels and blockers? By laying them over something. By hiding whatever is underneath. The drawings don’t illustrate independent forms, they make a barrier between yourself and the plain surface of the paper. Here you are now, in a room full of hidden things, with a number of human-sized pole-figures standing suspiciously in front of you, watching out. It strikes you that the covered objects creeping out across the surfaces in the room are trying to turn you into a version of themselves, sealing you in. They’re covering up the room as best they can (but she didn’t make them big enough). They don’t draw attention to the light or to the wall texture, but rather to the continuations of the walls, the places where the flat plane maintains the enclosure by going out or in. They pay attention to the room-box and they are boxes themselves. The show is a competition between boxes. Shaver will consider any fabric, any material: see the ripped cardboard and the cheap t-shirt stretched over one panel in the spacer called Variations in Black and Brown. Consider the word “spacers,” as if Shaver is imagining that one thing and another thing would seal their edges closely together if she didn’t put a space between them. Spacing her objects out along the walls, the artist places empty gaps between the paranoid sentinel forces that would like to come in and wrap the room around you, turning it into a fabric’d or scribbled box with no way out – if she didn’t save you with her installation. No hierarchy! Everything can pattern you.

On view at Parker Gallery, 2441 Glendower Ave, Los Angeles CA 90027 through August 1, 2021.

Published by Wendy Kveck on July 30, 2021