Thomas Erben is excited to announce a solo presentation of Yamini Nayar’s constructed photographs at NADA Miami, Thursday through Sunday, December 3–6, 2009. 

The artist has recently gained considerable recognition with her exhibition at the gallery this spring, which was reviewed in The New York Times by Holland Cotter, The New Yorker by Vince Aletti and featured as Lead International Review by editor Abhay Sardesai in Art India.

Yamini Nayar’s photoworks put into use a kind of makeshift methodology that questions and challenges the iconic in photography through the construction of interiors that draw primarily from historical representations of a broad range of sources including early 20th Century design efforts, religious architecture and quotidian dwellings. 

Her works are carefully constructed, evoking glimpses of what might be familiar, yet rendered open ended through various degrees of recognition. Recycled materials such as discarded wood and found objects combine within skeletal architectural structures to spaces which, according to Nayar, are ”territorialized” while at the same time formally considered; or, as Vince Alletti puts it: ”[…] interiors that look like their architects abandoned them, unfinished, and decided to invite the vandals in.” Generally, she is interested in how multiple, often suspended and sometimes conflicting narratives can co-exist – leaving residual traces that are flattened within the photograph. 

In Under a Night Sky, we see a temple-like space in understated colors within which the use of conflicting scales and perspectives both disorients and destabilizes. Strange Event alludes to what could be a Constructivist design whose stringency is countered by the playful use of materials; while in the bottom of the frame a lens flare confounds back- and foreground. Nayar’s focus on architectural spaces over the last several years, which she constructs as table top structures, stems from a core interest in how the subjective and collective experience translates into the interior as both vessel and stage. At the same time, her process is invested in the very act of how to build a photograph. 

Yamini Nayar, born 1975, grew up in Detroit, MI; after a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, she received her MFA in 2005 from the School of Visual Arts in New York where she lives and works.  Most notably, Nayar’s work will be included in The Empire Strikes Back, Saatchi Museum, London in 2009 and Vogue India’s December ‘08 issue listed her as one of India’s Ten Hottest Young Artists. The gallery first showed her photoworks in First Left, Second Right in 2007/08. Other exhibitions include: My Little India, Marella Gallery, Beijing, 2009; Sultana’s Dream, Exit Art, New York, 2007; Yamini Nayar and Sreshta Rit Premnath, BosePacia, New York, 2006; Fatal Love, Queens Museum of Art, NY, 2005. Reviews in TimeOut, New York Times, Asian Art News, Art Asia Pacific, Art India, Flash Art and, in Florida, Wynwood Magazine have all critically appraised her work.