NADA House 2021

Magenta Plains presents a site-specific installation by Brooklyn-based artist Nikholis Planck. Planck’s Ovoids are mounted and strung across a hallway corridor around architectural details as “floating cosmic droplets’’. The Ovoids are miniature paintings in the round executed in Planck’s molten treatment of painting. In his perfunctory fashion the “wooden eggs’’ are gessoed, scrawled upon then dipped in hot wax.

Finally, the artist renders oil paint in a gamut of checkered motifs, anatomical features, botanical studies, and ornamental designs. As with all of Planck’s paintings which investigate the medium’s permanence, relevance and potential ingenuity, the wax acts as a buffer to the permanent, seemingly on the verge of melting away, with the surface slipping off itself.

Magenta Plains presents a new public sculpture by Brooklyn-based artist Bill Saylor for display in the outdoor yards of Governor’s Island. The tridentesque sculpture stands totemical as an imperfect weathervane, fabricated from found objects and pressure treated plywood dipped in aqua resin to withstand environmental strains. The surfaces are painted and collaged with his personal iconography—a visual dynamic of symbols, frantic line work, and anthropomorphic creatures both real and hybrid, familiar yet uncanny. His anthropogenic concerns and interest in natural history, weather patterns, and marine biology come alive in this large-scale, three-dimensional piece, interacting with the surrounding landscape and visitors alike.