Nayland Blake

Nayland Blake makes a virtue of inconsistency. His work is rocky, tumultuous, uneven; it operates according to fitful, perverse logics. Still, some consistencies (or, perhaps, themes) can be found in this, Blake’s eighth solo exhibition at the gallery: an emphasis on routine habits in the face of trauma and uncertainty, and a steady cultivation of deliberate, magpie assemblage over the superficially spectacular. Probably better known for his work in video and performance (such as Gorge, 1998, in which a shirtless Blake is fed continuously for an hour, and Coat, his 2001 collaboration with A. A. Bronson), this show, featuring the dulcet title “What the Whiskey Said What the Sun is Saying,” finds him making drawings and sculptures that explore quieter territory.

Blake’s work is both humble and humbling, courageous and encouraging. His Dailies—thirty drawings made over the course of a month in 2005 following the sudden death of his longtime partner Philip Horvitz—are droll, cartoonish improvisations of grief. Freckled with the unusual, ludic iconography often associated with his work (hanging bunnies, bearded men, penises, decapitated heads), here the tragic folds into the comically absurd. They are spasms but not necessarily digestions of loss: the wound’s throbbing cicatrix.

Much of the rest of the gallery is given over to eleven untitled sculptures made from materials culled during Blake’s daily walks. Five exquisite amalgamations of felt, paint, and wood hung from the east wall seem interpretations of B. Wurtz or Richard Tuttle; from the wall adjacent, crumpled plastic bottles on a string cascade slackly, a deflated Tony Feher. They flank two additional sculptures, holding court in the center, which resemble the pathetic remnants of an art brut battlefield. In one, two felt flags droop above a wooden stool, a black, sausagelike pile dangling limply from its rear; in the other, fake flowers hang like mistletoe above six aluminum-can howitzers. These accumulations of the quotidian embrace (do they transcend?) their mundaneness: trophies commemorating nothing more than life’s stubborn recalcitrance.