Nathan Green, installation view with Windows, Gradient and Pizza Quilt, 2011
Nathan Green's painted work--at least what I've seen--has always played out as occupying a space between sculpture and installation while still being paintings. It has a variety of relationships to a space--or more properly to a wall. It may be hanging from the wall, in the standard way we think of paintings doing. It may be painted on the wall--which was standard for paintings before the invention of oil paints. It may leaning against the wall. It may be propped against the wall. Green seems to be taking liberties with what we expect paintings to do and to be, but he's not. It's only in well-appointed gallery spaces, in the public areas of museums and perfectly decorated homes do paintings reside in one space--on the wall, not touching the floor. Visit an artist's studio and you will see. Indeed, as I look around the room in which I'm typing this, I see plenty of paintings (and drawings and even an etching I did in college) on the wall. But I also see artwork stacked up in my closet, and paintings leaning against bookshelves (carefully... these are the works from Walpurgis Afternoon, waiting to be crated up and shipped to Jim Woodring and Marc Bell). In a way, Green symbolically recreates a gallery's back rooms, a museum's store rooms, or an artist's cluttered studio with the way he shows the work in his current show at Art Palace.
Nathan Green, Garage Arrangement/Sign, mixed media, 2011
Green is explicit in this display strategy with this piece. The name, Garage Arrangement, says it all. Things are arranged in your garage not for aesthetic reason, but at best for convenience, and more likely by a random entropic process. The piece is made of the kind of scrap one might find in a garage workshop, and is propped up against the wall the way your rakes and garden hoes might be.