Against Indifference: Suzanne Nacha’s Origin at Open Studio

Suzanne Nacha’s Origin presents a selection of prints from three series of monoprint screen-prints printed at Open Studio by Daryl Vocat. These series share a common format of paired laterally reversed circular forms. The forms for each series are images that have been abstracted from Nacha’s paintings of underground spaces (catacombs and tunnels). The subterranean iconography of the works revisits Nacha’s earlier series of mining images but reframes her engagement with the technocultural underworld as an allegorical examination of excavation and interiority. The titles for the series are drawn from an engagement with beginnings of Dante’s Inferno – the story of a descent into the earth that becomes a descent through the soul. The images in the first two series, Limbo Fraternal and The Indifferent: Double Articulation, have the same overarching title with a distinguishing phrase appended in brackets. The third series, Against Oneself, is divided into two sub-series with the related sub-titles Double Bind and Double Blind. The difference hinges on the sense of the image’s engagement with the viewer: whether or not the tunnel imagery can look back at us.

             The paired circular forms variously suggest holes in the surface, swellings, eyes, faces, targets, and masks. The diptych format creates a sense of narrative or implied action – in which viewers read the two circles against each other. Despite the stillness of the source images there is a dynamism to the images, particularly as we read them in relation to the larger series. While the images are contained in their forms, their relation to page and each other is vital to the workings of the prints. The images in Limbo Fraternal are confined by the edge of the circles which circumscribe the limits of the images’ composition. The Indifferent and Against Oneself are constructed differently; the elements of the image work to allow the forms to find an edge that articulates itself according to the requirements of the images rather than constructing them in relation to their frames.

As with any screen-print, the images are built up from the accumulation of printed layers of color that combine to form a representation of the source paintings. Each of the color layers is a separate screen on which Nacha has painted, in a series of quick, fluid gestures, the elements of the images. However, rather than producing a series of reproductions of her paintings, Nacha instead explores the possibilities opened up by the decomposition of the images into stratifications of shape and color. These layers, or strata, then function as building blocks in the articulation of the series as Nacha removes layers from the images and reconfigures the color choices. In doing so, she detaches the prints from a logic of reproduction and representation and re-articulates their operation as a space of investigation.

             In Dante’s reading, Limbo is the space on the outskirts of hell for good people who are excluded from heaven based on an accident of birth; the indifferent are the souls who made no choices in life, thus sinning against themselves, the result of which is that there is not enough moral weight to their lives to be judged. For this reason, the indifferent remain on the near shore of the river Styx unable to commit to crossing over. The title’s reference to a failure of choice could be interpreted as underlying the need to create permutations of the series rather than settling on a fixed image. However, the aesthetic operating in these images emerges not from an inability to make choices but from a careful positioning of the works in relation to a threshold which they continually invite us to cross over. The works create a productive tension and oscillation between an interiority that recedes from us and an image that looks out at us, between the evocation of space and the assertion of a surface, between masks that can be seen and faces that can be engaged; a tension, in other words, that asks viewers to aesthetically commit to the images. In this regard, Nacha’s prints, despite their subject, work against indifference.