In flux, solo show

underground gallery

Naguiat’s fabrics seem to be caught in shifting states. Translucent layers of the same cloth accrete into a shimmer, its forms quivering between emergence or submersion. They refer to a memory: a past self imagining a future presently unfolding. And perhaps to a waft of a peculiar kind of nostalgia— one reserved for youthful yearnings and inclinations, proclivities and daydreams. And now that childhood imaginings have temporally caught up with reality, Naguiat seems to ask, was it everything you’ve ever dreamed of and more? Texts embroidered on fabric intimate an answer, of thwarted desires, misplaced optimism, and woefully miscalculated conjectures. Here, the absence of a wearer implies presence, of a persistent selfhood in changing dimensions, of constancy belied by minute (yet all too inevitable) corporeal alterations and degenerations. Framed as they are, they affect an intimacy of fabric on skin. Or perhaps the fabric as skin. An epidermis that one sheds depending on the exigencies of the present, or on particular manifest or implied expectations— as child, as woman, as artist. Floating, these fabrics as skin bear with lightness the strain of constantly shifting selves. - JC ROSETTE