Nina Katchadourian

Born 1968 in Stanford/CA, lives and works in Brooklyn/NY

www.ninakatchadourian.com

Galleries:
Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York
Catherine Clark Gallery, San Francisco/CA




Nina Kathchadourian’s intelligent investigations of our orientation to the surrounding, ultra-mediated world often reveal an eccentric (and sometimes nutty) streak, which makes them all the more memorable. In the past, she has mended torn spider’s webs with a needle and thread, separated thousands of cars in the vast parking lot of a Southern California community college according to color (all the red cars in one lot, white in another, blue in another, and so forth), and fashioned car alarms in New York that sounded like jungle birds.  Kathchadourian is an original, with a sensibility that is at once antic and profound, and her offbeat conceptualism spans sculpture, photography, sound works, video, and other media.

Several years ago Nina Katchadourian noticed that a large banner heralding the grand opening of a new local deli in her Brooklyn neighborhood had been misspelled as GRNAD OPENING. On one level, her photograph of this unfortunate but hilarious spelling mistake, and her recreation of the original banner memorialize a comical linguistic mishap. But these two humorous works have a subtle complexity. It is likely that the owners of this deli are (or were) foreigners, with perhaps not the greatest command of English, meaning that such a spelling mistake could easily have been a common occurrence. Katchadourian’s works are suddenly imbued with potent societal issues, involving immigration, the difficulty speakers of other languages have adapting to a dominant new language, and even how big dreams oftentimes falter in the “land of opportunity.” Endless utopianism and optimism, followed by disappointment, mistakes, and unforeseen difficulties, is a recurring motif in America, leading back to Puritan times. When an intrepid band of early-seventeenth-century Puritans fled Europe to establish their New Jerusalem in the New World, what they expected to find was a land of milk and honey, but what they got instead was a forlorn, wintry, inhospitable, windswept coast in what is now Massachusetts, and this bleak arrival was their GRNAD OPENING moment. In Carnival Within, Katchadourian’s red, white, and blue banner is a cross between a commercial advertisement and an alluring circus sign, and it evokes endless cycles of expectation and error.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2008–09: The Marfa Sessions, Ballroom, Marfa/TX
2008: Cerca Series: Nina Katchadourian,
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
2008: Loop 08. International Festival & Fair for Video Art, Barcelona

Bibliography:
Julian Myers, “We Interrupt Your Program,” in Frieze, May 2008
Suzanne Hudson, “Nina Katchadourian: One Chase Manhattan Plaza,” in Artforum, March 2007
Nina Katchadourian: All Forms of Attraction, text by Frances Richard, interview by Ian Berry, exh. cat. Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs/NY 2006