Nancy Azara is a sculptor, and a feminist artist, working primarily in wood, mixed media collage, and prints. Her sculpture is made of carved, gilded, assembled wood; while her collages are composed of mylar, paper, paint, and the occasional found wood object. Azara’s densely layered art engages with memory, personal history, and the cyclical nature of time. Azara’s work has been shown extensively, most recently in a solo show The Meeting of the Birds at Kaaterskill Gallery, Hunter Village, NY; Ink: New Prints at Site: Brooklyn Gallery, Curated by Laura G. Einstein; and Labyrinths of the Mind at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY. Her solo show at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY in 2021 featured a series of crows including a wall hanging. She is the author of Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art available through Red Wheel/Weiser. Her work has been written about and reviewed by such publications as Art in America, New York Times, Art Forum, ArtNet Magazine, Woodstock Times, among many more. She teaches workshops and classes in art-making and meditation.
In Votives: Sculptures by Nancy Azara, the artist presents carved and painted sculptures from 2010 to the present that record a journey of ideas and memories around the unseen and the unknown, reflecting on time and mortality through facets of her personal history. Azara’s use of real tree limbs and vines alongside arboreal imagery act as stand-ins for her own presence and as expressions of the dogged persistence of life. Processes of pressing and rubbing, cutting, and pasting, scraping, and gouging are evident throughout the finished images and objects. Azara states, “I often balance instinctive marks against more considered decisions, arriving at a dynamic interplay between the deliberate manipulation of materials and the operation of chance.” Along with her sculptural work, the exhibition features a heraldic crow banner hung in our public installation space On the Wall, depicting birds’ plumage, which can be exhibited indoors or outdoors.
The Carter Burden Gallery is a program of The Carter Burden Network designed to give a voice to New York City’s re-emerging older professional artists. The Carter Burden Network is a non-profit organization established in 1971 by the late Carter Burden, a New York City Councilman.
By: WM
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