De Chiara/Stewart Gallery is pleased to feature the recent work of New York based Canadian
artist Donna Nield in its main gallery March 23 through April 23. While Nield's work has been
on view at a number of venues in New York City, Europe and Canada, this is her first
one-person show with DeChiara/Stewart.
Over the past five years Nield's photographic and sculptural installations have insistently
engaged in critical and aesthetic dialogue with public architectural systems. For Nield, our
constructed environment is a maze whose calculated pathways not only motivate and
determine our movement through the world, but also describe a systematic order.
With her most recent body of work Nield looks to the interior as a site for social and
psychological displacements in the constructed environment. From her isolation of familiar
interior details to her use of urethane coated foam, Nield divorces objects and environments
from their functional status.
The soft, pie-shaped wedges that comprise Nield's floor-to-ceiling spiral Staircase offers no
entry to the floor above and the resiliency of each step implies the failure of any imagined
climb. The modular components of Quartered Circle are suggestive of the mod sectional
communal seating designs of the 1970s. Its functional construction, however, disrupts the
material and perceptual clarity generally ascribed to Minimalist sculpture in a manner that
raises questions not only of how we situate ourselves within our environment, but also how
aesthetic legacies influence and define our phenomenological perspectives.
In many respects the success of Nield's work is in how it incites a dialogue concerning
questions of ideological and perceptual failure: how the things we use and the spaces we
inhabit are both, not as, and more than they appear to be.
De Chiara|Stewart
521 West 26th St., New York City 10001
Tel 212.967.6007 Fax 212.967.1604
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11:00-6:00 pm
Exhibition Dates: March 23- April 24, 2000
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 25th, 6:00-8:00 p.m.
image: "Quartered Circle" 1999, foam and sprayed polyurethane, h. 22", d.70"
For more information contact: Richard Stewart 212.967.6007