James Nares Goes High Speed at Paul Kasmin Gallery By Ann Binlot

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1 September 24, 2014 James Nares Goes High Speed at Paul Kasmin Gallery By Ann Binlot In many ways James Nares art is one linear progression. Many of his paintings capture the curves and movement of a single brush stroke, while his film Street follows the denizens of New York City as the go about their day. In his latest body of work, High Speed Drawings, on display through October 25 at Paul Kasmin Gallery s 10 th Avenue location in New York, Nares concocted a peculiar machine with a cylinder that he places a sheet of paper on before turning it on so it can spin around at around 30 to 40 miles per hour as he touches it with brushes soaked in Chinese ink. The result is a set of beautiful, captivating stripes that is akin the blur that occurs while watching the world quickly go by as you sit inside a quickly moving train. I had the chance to meet with the London-born, Brooklyn-based artist, who has been in New York since 1974, at the gallery as he installed the large-scale paintings to ask him about how he developed the machine, his new series, and whether or not he hurt himself while working with such a fast contraption. How did you decide to create the machine? How did you figure out the mechanics? I can t remember any Eureka! moment, but it seems it must ve emerged slowly from the cesspool of my imagination. When did you first build it? The first one was a cardboard storage drum that I experimented with and I did a few drawings with that but I realized how great it would be if I could go all out with this so I ve had the drum made by someone who put it all together. What about the smaller one shaped like a cone? That s a very jury rigged device to get a sense of what might be possible with a conical drum, I haven t really gone down that avenue yet but waiting to be traveled.

2 So those won t be in the shows. That was like a game I was playing with myself. What inspired it all? Did you just think, Instead of me moving, the canvas is moving? I think so; I think line is an element in almost everything I do. The paintings are really lines and these are an accumulation of lines. It s clearer in the black and white ones where it is closer to being a single line. Sometimes is actually a single line slowly traveling across the surface of the paper. In these, it s multiple lines with different colors. They accumulate to what you see. I like how they reference those old wax cylinders that came before vinyl like Thomas Edison and like the first sound recording machines. And there is a sonic element to these, which is also quite present in things that I do. The machine itself makes a rhythmical sound and that somehow features in the product. It does kind of look like sound waves. Yea, sound waves. Another thing I like about these, at first glance, it seems like a bunch of straight lines, and then you see that none of the lines are straight. There s not a single straight line in the whole show. They are all slightly bowed, which reminds me of a vibrating string instrument, so they are sonic in that way. If you try to follow a line from one side to another, it disappears. All the lines morph, like this pink one, turns into something else. Why does it disappear at that point? That s because my hand is moving the whole time. The work is sensitive to the vibrations and movements and pressures of my hand, the same way paintings are, but different. How long have you been working on this series? The first ones were done just over a year ago.

3 What did you do before the drum? I had the cardboard one, but I didn t like what I was getting with that, so I ordered the metal one. And it took a while for that to come, so for a few months I had nothing and just did my other stuff. It arrived and we got the whole thing set up about six to seven months ago. How long does it take you to produce? Does it vary? It varies a lot. Some are quicker than others. The more intricate colored ones can take, I would say, a day to one of these probably. Working over and over. Basically it s spinning. So basically this line where it ends here begins again there. Each line, if you imagine a big circle, the lines go around and around and around. And to get these shadings? These shadings come from my new fluctuations from the surface of the drum, which get magnified. You feel it when it is still, you can hardly feel any fluctuations, but its speed becomes more apparent with the brush speeds over the gaps and valleys. Basically you have brushes in different shades. I have different [ones]. I can unscrew a color and put another one on. I can change colors by putting a different pot and screwing to the top of the brush. Are they all large scale?

4 Yea. Not a bad ratio. They also reference the films, particularly in these horizontal ones. My film Street. Because it s this horizontal movement and the high speed elements, high speed camera. I think that s where the title came from. It s interesting that you can apply that same kind of movement from the film where the subjects are people, to art, which is more abstract, but there is still a strong connection. I like to feel it there. In a sense, I m happy to see things get like this. Imagine being in a room seeing a continuation like looking out of a train. This one is slightly out of focus part in the background. The speed bumps, I guess that s what you call it, they create like another plane behind the lines, so there s depth. The machine, it looks kind of dangerous, did you ever hurt yourself? I didn t, but I did worry about doing it. Like getting trapped. Did you wear any protective gear? I don t but I always careful to get too close to the axis. What is up for you next? I m very busy right now. A lot of screenings of Street. Interesting places, like the Frankfurt Opera is showing a piece of music for a quartet that s 5 hours long. They want to show Street at the same time, so the both kind of mirror one another and both do with things slowing down. See spaces between things. It s five hours of Lamont Young and one hour of myself repeated five times. It s like seeing the film with five different soundtracks.

5 When is that going to be? Beginning of October. I m also going to do a guitar duo with Thurston Moore at the New York Art Book Fair. He did the soundtrack. He ed me asking if I would do a guitar duo with him, which I m excited about doing. We ve never played together. When s that going to be? The 25 th of September. Then I have a discussion on stage with Robert Wilson at his Watermill Center. That was supposed to be in September but changed to November. What were the biggest challenges of creating this series of work? There was a lot of learning to do. I had to learn what my brushes would do. I had to invent the system and discover what it could do. And then loosen up and fly with it. There were technical problems like getting the drums to be absolutely smooth which was a story in and of itself. But, really just learning how to play the instrument that I made. One of my things, I like playing instruments. What instruments do you play? Anything I can get my hands on. I guess, if I play anything, it s guitar. I have a few guitars. That would be my instrument. But I pretend to be a great musician. I m more of rhythmist with a guitar. You re like a rhythmist in every sense. There s a lot of rhythm in these things. High Speed Drawings is on display at Paul Kasmin Gallery though October 25.

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