Conversations across distance
A recent pop-up art exhibit hosted at 10 North Main Street, next to The Wooly in downtown Gainesville Florida brought together an unusual collection of art and artists. Connected neither by thematic concerns, subject matter, materials or processes, nor through formal similarities or quirky contrasts, the exhibit had one element in common: Nitin Jayaswal.
The exhibit was titled “next level. a group show in remembrance of Nitin Jayaswal” and featured the work of Nitin and a number of his friends, collaborators, and former teachers, including me.
A collection of works made by Nitin Jayaswal
The exhibit, held in an intimate and well-located space, included paintings, drawings, jewelry, sculpture, architectural models, sketches, keepsakes, and photos. The walls were abundantly filled, as was the floor space during the first of the show’s two evenings. Freestanding sculptures, artists, and assorted friends jostled convivially to view the work and visit with each other.
The exhibit was curated by Old Head, a group of local artists dedicated to producing curated art shows. Old Head member Shawn Maschino explained that Nitin had attended a show curated by the collective last summer and spoken with him about doing a show. Nitin had hoped to show his own work, alongside his friends. Tragically, Nitin passed away in his sleep just a few days later. Shawn explained that he felt obliged to follow through after Nitin’s passing.
Across the space, at the recent pop-up’s opening night, dozens of conversations echoed, wafted, catapulted, ricocheted, reflected on, and absorbed the wide range of visual and spatial expression converging to remember and honor Nitin.
The invited artists seem to have interacted with Nitin in one or several ways: artists who taught Nitin, those who collaborated with him, and those he counted among his friends. In the end, we were all included in the latter group.
From left: George Ferrandi, Shaine McDonald, Kim Tanzer, Named Mojadidi, Celeste Roberge
Three artists taught Nitin, and we all saw his evolution from talented student to accomplished artist. One of his first design teachers, Louise Brown, contributed three collages. Brown’s images featured eerie fragments of faces woven into thick mats of architectural and landscape elements. Celeste Roberge, Nitin’s UF sculpture teacher, sent 11 x 17 archival prints from her home in Portland Maine. Adjusting her long-running theme of stolid figures to incorporate the seaweed inspired by her seaside location, Roberge’s hybrid creatures from her “Thinking While Walking Under the Sea” exhibition occupy a similarly hybrid landscape. They walk on and under water, in vibrating landscapes constrained within sharp horizontal bands. I was the third of Nitin’s professors. I taught him architectural design and architectural theory at UF. As I selected my contribution, I tried to imagine what might have pleased Nitin. I chose a graphite drawing, a dense cloud of scribbles from my “Perturbed Fields” series. Mine was the only black + white work in the show, except for many of Nitin’s drawings—revealing our shared architectural predilections.
Brad Smith’s sculpture, left, Dave Peck’s two totemic sculptures, right. Louise Brown’s prints are in the distance.
Nitin’s collaborators were also his friends. Sculptures by Brad Smith and Dave Peck demonstrated their shared affinity for materials, and their shared excellence as craftsmen. Smith’s piece, an exuberant forked tree trunk incessantly marked with precise gouges was set on a tall steel base causing the viewer to confront the sculpture as one body to another. Dave Peck’s contribution, two austere totems, almost perfectly bracketed Smith’s piece. One, wood with an oxidized metal collar, and the other, a tall thin rod topped with criss-crossed horizontals, rose from elegant concrete bases set on circular and square metal plates respectively. The cluster, placed around one of the space’s structural columns, created a small grove-like impediment around which viewers swirled. NYC based sculptor and performance artist George Ferrandi, had shared art adventures in Gainesville with Nitin. She contributed a series of fractal-like prints—both whimsical and precise. Printed in indigo as if cyanotypes, they are part of her “Receiver Four: Abuelita” series.
Margaret Ross Tolbert, Nitin’s frequent collaborator and long-time partner, contributed four paintings, along with photographs of installed projects she and Nitin did together. (Her own work, inspired by Florida’s freshwater springs, is currently the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Appleton Museum in Ocala.) Fluctuating perspectives and points of view, vibrant colors, and unnamable shapes characterize this oeuvre. Several pieces reveal multiple layers of marks and erasures, while one is almost purely poured stains and paints. Tolbert also contributed photographs of projects she and Nitin did together, including abstracted Turkish tea seating placed around a beautiful cast concrete pool from a long-ago museum installation.
Anna Löwdin, left, and Margaret Ross Tolbert, right
Anna Löwdin, a Swedish painter, contributed several small landscape-based abstractions. Some were watercolors, and one was an oil painting, framed within its own deep blue painted context. Löwdin also shared a memory of Nitin sledding, with child-like delight, near Stockholm while he participated in an exhibition.
Naheed Mojadidi, Angela Keidel, Anthony Campanaro and Shaine McDonald were among his artist-friends. Mojadidi contributed two pieces, each featuring scorpions on warped black + white tiled backgrounds, like crossword puzzles on acid. Despite their unsettling context, the deep red scorpions seemed unperturbed. Keidel offered several paintings and some jewelry, all sharing a languid linear motif. Soft colors and bent lines were consistent throughout the work. Anthony Companaro contributed a lamp, fusing the techniques of shoji screens with the quintessential modernist iconography of the grid. His piece was incorporated into a shrine-like collection of Nitin’s photographs and artifacts. Shaine McDonald presented a series of drawings, each made with deep vibrant colors and incised symbolic line drawings. On her Instagram feed she explained, “these pieces were made thinking about Nitin sleeping/dreaming in the moments before he joined the great mystery. What consciousness looks like as we pass from dream state to merge.”
Celeste Roberge, left, and Angela Keidel, right
And what about Nitin? What did he contribute to the conversation from the “merge”? His work, selected by friends, was varied in scale and intention, but consistent, and consistently rigorous, formally. His drawings are spare and precise. He had an exceptional sense of composition, and extraordinary craft. His “dolly,” a wheeled cart with lopsided wheels, demonstrated his fierce sense of humor, his attention to detail, and his technical ingenuity. The accompanying drawings indicate how he turned the dolly’s uneven tracks into wobbly concrete cast benches—masterworks of precision and whimsy. Two shelves filled with architectural models, favorite objects, feathers, and his beloved carved gar, suggested the breadth of his inspirations and his artistic output.
Standing in the room that evening, I caught snippets of dozens of conversations. Some swirled around me, as people spoke about the show and their memories of Nitin. Some traveled through the ether—Celeste from Portland, Anna from Stockholm, George from Brooklyn, and of course, Nitin from the great mystery. We saw the impact we had--each of us--on him, and I felt, in real time, him conversing among us from across a distance.
Cover photo by Shawn Maschino. All other images by author.
For more information about Old Head:
Instagram: @oldheadgnv
Facebook: Old Head
Email: oldheadgnv@gmail.com