On first impression, Dala Nasser’s Hibiscus (all works 2022) is a reminder of the poverty of language when faced with the complexities of color. One could describe it as a square patchwork of pillowcases and bedsheets bordered with red duct tape, its gray and brown fabric steeped with washes of pink and purple and flecked with white grit and sand. The generalizing vocabulary of color, however, fails to capture what is so specific about the shades and tones archived in this work. The dye staining the sheets was made from hibiscus, rose, and anemone flowers growing on Nasser’s family farm in south Lebanon. The leaching of the dye was caused by rain, which fell on the sheets when they were left outside, over several months, on that same land. Nasser’s colors are indexes of a place: its flora, its weather.

In works like Oak, Zaytoun, and Flint Stone, scuffed marks are produced by charcoal rubbings. Others, like Anemone, are pockmarked with singed holes, the traces of ash and fire. Indexes are sometimes thought to be products of an instant—the flash of a camera, the fall of a footstep—but Nasser’s latest works are products of slow accretion. The steeping of dye and the rubbing of stones, the flowering of petals and gradual changes in climate. They are thus indexes of time, too, expanding what we can see, and what we can say, when care gathers the beauty, and violence, that is layered in this and any other landscape.

— Kevin Brazil