Nayland Blake: Free!Love!Tool!Box!

Nayland Blake was one of the pioneers of performance art in the Bay Area in the 1980s. His work often explored aspects of the queer urban lifestyle. Though now based in New York, his most recent work is a return to his earlier processes from that period, where materials and spontaneity generate sculptural works that are informal, precarious, nonsensical, and odd or uncanny. While Blake is known for his symbol-laden works of black and white bunnies, ghosts, black liquid, or household objects gone… Show more awry, he is now entering another phase of production, where he intends to eschew an approach to object-making that trades on creating symbolic meaning. This is an interesting gamble and one that appears to be motivated by a desire to wipe the slate clean and get back in touch with the most intuitive aspects of his practice.

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