Jenene Nagy’s exhibition, The Weight, at the Helzer’s Gallery on Portland Community College’s Rock Creek campus is a welcome dialogue of artistic concept inextricably connected to a profound commitment to artistic making. The word “weight” is commonly related to the measure of relative mass and implies a burden, but also can suggest importance and a quantifier of depth of concept. Materials inevitably weigh on art, affecting both the physicality and the conceptual underpinnings of work. Nagy’s treatment of her materials acutely carries the weight of this exhibition.
Approaching the Helzer Gallery, I was immediately made aware of the show’s namesake. The Weight (2016) is a six-and-a-half-foot tall by nearly twenty-foot long object hung on the wall opposite the gallery’s entrance. Framed by the gallery’s glass doors, the bright gallery lighting enhances the work’s lustrous, patterned surface, urging the viewer to further investigate.
Entering the gallery, the exhibition unfolds into three additional large works: untitled 4 (from stars), untitled 5 (from stars), and untitled 6 (from stars). Each of these pieces were completed in 2024 and are similar in nature to The Weight: large, rectangular, with a dark patterned surface, yet these newer works are bolder compositions, including a glint of brightness, often accenting an edge. Two framed pieces, untitled (twilight 1) and untitled (twilight 2), also completed in 2024, are installed on a modest wall next to the entrance. Moderate in size, the formality as well as the materiality distinguishes this pair from the other works, though integrating nicely into the full exhibition. Untitled 7 (2024), presents a curious anomaly. Installed in a corner, the work traverses two walls, suggesting future inclinations of Nagy’s explorations.
As a whole, the striking austere tones of the collection asserts a calmness onto the gallery space. The larger works predictably command the most attention with their size and self-assuredness, hanging heavily like freshly unfolded quilts or tarps. Innocuously the materials listed for the large works are noted as “graphite on folded paper” with the addition of “silver” on the three works untitled (from stars). Yet when approaching one of these wall-mounted sculptural-interventions, the metallic surface reveals itself as an extraordinary accumulation of innumerable parallel graphite marks covering large sheets of folded paper seamed together. Each graphite mark is about an inch long with a width of the rounded tip of a pencil. These insistent marks completely obscure the 19 x 26 inch sheets of cotton rag paper, permitting only the creases, seams, and draping to communicate the character of the underlying surface.
Viewed closely, the drawings present an odd totality of an impenetrable plane consisting of the fragility of particles of unfixed graphite clinging to the tooth of an unseen, but acutely present and delicate substrate.
Facing the openness and extent of the work, unavoidable questions arise, often attempting to quantify the effort and rationale of endeavoring such an enormous task. Yet, decoding the significance of the work or calculating the labor disrupts the act of experiencing the work. Ultimately, meaning is confounded by singularities, and time becomes an untrustworthy measure of effort. Nagy states in the exhibition text, “there is slowness here, both in the making and the viewing, with both having quiet rewards.”
The work stands wholly on Nagy’s commitment to a totality of acting without clearly marking the impetus or clarifying a conclusion. Process is evident, though the method of making through repeated acts of folding, marking, and seaming resists validating artistic importance, neither pointing at heroics nor compulsion. One persistent mark after another simply adds to the incantation, accumulating into a rhythm, organizing into rhymes, and shaping presence.
My visit to Helzer Gallery is the third time I have seen The Weight—the piece. The first time was in the dynamic architectural space of a Culver City gallery. The work had only recently been completed, and it fit effortlessly in the shrine-like context, glowing in the exuberance of a sunny Southern California afternoon. A few years later I viewed the piece in a contemporary art museum located in the vastness of Wyoming. The work filled and prospered in the generous, solemn space of a modernist temple to art. Now I sit in a small educational gallery on PCC Rock Creek campus, breathing in the humbleness of the work. In this chapel The Weight and its companions reveal a lightness, sidestepping overt influences of commodity or weighted distinctions within a fine art canon. The work seems to absorb casual student traffic outside the gallery while captivating those who venture inside, shifting the gallery into a place of quiet reflection. In this context, The Weight is allowed to radiate the energy of its making, a commitment to body and mind—a meditation on a creative life, discovery through the experience of creating, and an expression of poetics.
Jenene Nagy: The Weight
Helzer Gallery at PCC Rock Creek, Portland, OR
March 6 to May 4, 2024
This review was made possible by generous support from Critical Conversations, The University of Oregon Center for Art Research (CFAR), and The Ford Family Foundation.