Nayland Blake’s newest work is produced with a combination of found and made objects. Blake seeks out the spontaneous moments in daily life and uses them as departures for his art. A modern-day flaneur, he accumulates elements and materials for his sculptures through his daily wanderings, continuing to explore the themes of gender, identity, and community in his work as he has for more than twenty years.
Nayland Blake (b. 1960) first exhibited his work in 1985. He has had one-person exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Houston, Brussels, and London, including a 2003 survey of more than ten years of video work at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, and a 2008 retrospective of work in all media at Location One, New York. Last year, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, presented a one-man exhibition entitled Free! Love! Tool! Box!. In 2012, Blake was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Blake chairs the International Center of Photography-Bard MFA program and lives and works in Brooklyn. This will be his eighth one-person exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery since 1993.