AUTOLYSE
Sean Nash / Nolani Stolz
02.07-03.07.2025
Opening Reception |
Friday, February 7: 6-9pm
T/F Artist Reception w/ Sean Nash:
Sat, March 11 am - 12:30 pm
Closing Reception |
Friday, March 7: 6-9 pm
Autolyse is an aerobic, two-person exhibition featuring abstract paintings by Sean Nash and hybrid ceramic sculptures by Nalani Stolz. Both artists use the organic as material and metaphor in their work, creating spaces and vessels with porous boundaries and effervescent edges. While Stolz’s forms ooze and crystallize, rise and burst at the seams, Nash’s churning compositions cycle through processes of destruction, splitting, and transformation. Although Stolz and Nash approach the visualization of bodily change and systems in different ways, their work shares a fascination with the breakdown and restructuring of bodies, and that nebulous wonderous space that opens up between the states of collapsing and arising. Autolyse presents the site of creative production as one of digestion, and celebrates the kitchen-lab-studio as a place where ideas are meant to percolate and germinate.
Sean Nash's new body of paintings are as expansive as they are particular–micro and macro ecosystems that turn inside-out and outside-in. The paintings are full of familiar shapes that draw on the visual and morphological parallels between universal forms—spirals that look like snail shells that look like the cochlea of the human inner ear. The color palette of sanguine reds and papery yellows, acidic greens and alkaline blues, is informed by the color palette of a pH, or litmus test. Through this color language, Nash reminds us that paint and pigment can be both organic material and political medium. It is a way for the artist to tether image-making to the natural world—to food, and micro-organism, to our slightly alkaline bodies and the increasing acidity of our oceans. Within their inquisitive surfaces, the paintings propose an alternative version of a figurative “litmus test,” one in which there is nothing to prove.
Despite Nash’s love and knowledge of food and natural sciences, these paintings are not diagrams. A more fitting container would be a fermentation croc—brewing, agitating,and generating some serious heat. Ultimately, they remain open-ended and abstract, situated in the speculative terrain of developing queer and trans ecological worlds. They play with fluid boundaries between materials, substances, and phenomena, hinting at an ongoing interchange between forms and lifeforms.
Nalani Stolz creates sculptures with the intention for them to react to the world and evolve. In an almost uncanny manner, her work reveals the similar ways in which different bodies intake and expel material, and what they are capable of when faced with catalyzing elements. With her “Bread Body” series and “Seeping” works, Stolz crafts sculptural forms that breathe and evolve like living creatures, replete with hair, skin, and liquid secretions. Drawing from manual and domestic processes like cooking, baking, and stitching, Stolz repurposes these familiar activities into alternative modes of creation that evoke the body and its many processes (such as weeping or menstruating). Due to the chemical nature of rising dough and fermentation, Stolz’s sculptures stretch and transform over time, growing folds of skin, bumps upon the surface, and even droplets of liquid as they age and respond to the changing circumstance of their own material processes.
Encountering Stolz’s work is to be reminded of the tension between compulsion and repulsion when confronted with the messy reality of being a living, breathing being, and it reminds us that our bodies are capable of all kinds of strange miracles and radical changes. Stolz does not shirk away from the unruly aspects of this process, or of surrendering the work to the volatile nature of change. Rather, she embraces and actively welcomes the distinct way her sculptures might shrink and expand, dissolve or solidify, as they are exposed to heat, vinegar, and chemical breakdown. There is a delight in seeing how Stolz’s work manifests the riotous internal physical properties of bodily change—of aging and decomposition, of adaptation and survival.
In biology, “autolyse”is the term for self-destruction by a cell. In bread baking, autolyse is a vital resting process in which that destruction creates flavor and aroma. For both artists (and bread-makers), this title feels like a fitting metaphor. For Stolz, time is used as an active ingredient that leads to both break-down and creation. Or as Nash's work proposes, when might it be necessary to self-destruct? To redraw or reform? The works in Autolyse come together to imagine a more fragrant and delicious existence, even if this requires rupture. When might it be necessary to rise in ferment, to stay agitated, and demand change?
Curated by Anna Wehrwein and Lynn Kim
Sean Nash is a visual artist based in Kansas City, Kansas, whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and writing, and extends to his multiple engagements with human and more-than-human worlds. His work peers into dynamic and changing ecosystems and references his experiences with fermentation and the natural world. His work was recently shown at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS, in conjunction with the Charlotte Street Fellows Award he received in 2023. His permanent public commission, Kansas City Reciprocity, was completed for the new Kansas City International Airport in 2022. Nash’s individual and collaborative writing on art, fermentation, and queer and trans* identity has been published in Fermenting Feminism, Musings: Food, Feminism, Fermentation, and his essay on “transfermentation,” an ongoing project with trans fermenters, will be published in the forthcoming trans ecologies edition of Transgender Studies Quarterly. Nash received his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University and a BFA from UT Knoxville. He has exhibited nationally, including solo shows at the Volland Foundation in Alma, KS, The Kniznick Gallery in Waltham, MA, Plug Projects in Kansas City, MO, and Black Ball Projects in Brooklyn, NY.
Nalani Stolz is a sculptor and installation artist based in the Midwest. Through materials that shift and change over time, Nalani explores how it feels to inhabit the body. From 2014-2018, she founded anddirected The Birdsell Project, an arts organization and residency program that focuses on bringing artist into spaces to create site-responsive installations. Nalani has created her own site-specific installations through Brickscape Residency, The Birdsell Project, The Ohio State University, The Columbus Printed Arts Center and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Along with her installations, Nalani has shown her sculptural work at Woman Made Gallery, The South Bend Museum of Art, The Sculpture Center, and Urban Arts Space. Nalani received her BA in Sculpture at Whitman College and her MFA in Sculpture from The Ohio State University and has recently completed residencies at Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts, Township10 and Anderson Ranch Center for the Arts.
