Young Space Digest, no.2

On taking good breaks, viewing the Midwest, and stunning textile sculptures

Hello! Welcome to your weekly roundup of great exhibitions and opportunities from Young Space! Today’s edition is a preview of the additional edition that goes out to paid subscribers. If you want to receive an update every single week, consider supporting through a paid subscription—it supports this newsletter and Dovetail Mag—otherwise, the next full digest will be in your inbox next week!

Below, you’ll find:

• A note on taking good breaks

• Feature: Sagarika Sundaram’s first show in NYC

• From the Midwest, with love: Nathan Pearce’s new book

Paid subscribers will also see:

• Five great exhibitions on view this week in California, New York, Texas, and the U.K.

• Nine opportunities for artists with deadlines coming up soon

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Firstly, I’m frankly pretty overwhelmed with gratitude for the notes and encouragement I received this week following the announcement that this project was rebooting. I’ve really missed this community—perhaps more than I even realized!—and coming back totally refreshed is like coming home after a long trip.

I thought I’d briefly mention, too, how totally rad it is to take a break. Call it a hiatus, a pause, a gap, a holiday, or anything you want, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that life and following happenings in the world—whether they affect us personally or not—can be weights. Sometimes, big ones. And as creative people, always looking, absorbing, sorting, applying, expressing… it all can get very heavy.

Personally, I needed a break for a long time, and I was scared of what would happen if I put a hold on something that had become fundamental to my whole lifestyle, and if we’re being totally honest, I often conflated work with who I was as an individual. Talk about the perils of “personal branding,” but that’s a rant for another time.

Often, though, sitting in the middle of something that’s become muddy is just… well, it’s hard to tell, isn’t it? It’s difficult to see anything from there; nothing is clear, and you feel like sludge. Occasionally, there’s nothing else for it but to just get out of there completely so you can look at the whole picture—stand up, dry off, take a look around, and figure out whether you want to dive back in, find a different spot, or maybe a whole new pond… or puddle… I’ve obviously got this metaphor down pat.

Hope you enjoy the news this week! —Kate x

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Feature: Sagarika Sundaram

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Sagarika Sundaram’s felted textile pieces sing with color. Working sculpturally and often at a large-scale, the artist is painterly with the medium, which she layers and and gestures with as if capturing brushstrokes in fiber. In her current solo exhibition, Source, at Palo Gallery, the artist’s first show in New York City, a 3D piece suspended from the ceiling evokes a colorful ode to Magdalena Abakanowicz’s dimensional, body-like Abakans and layers unfurl like the pages of books.

I love that Sundaram makes the process of felting—a physical and repetitive process of working sections of wool or roving into a matted fabric—appear organic and lightweight. Some fibers seem to float on top of the rest, while other pieces comprise dense layers that one is tempted to pull back or turn over, to reveal what the artist chooses to conceal. These works ply at the thin membrane between interiority and our external environment, what the gallery aptly describes as the “impossibility of separating the human from the natural and the interior from the exterior.”

Source is on view at Palo Gallery through February 4.

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Nathan Pearce’s High & Lonesome

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I love a Midwest connection. When I moved back to Wisconsin after grad school, in 2014, Nathan Pearce was one of the first artists I met. An Illinois native, he participated in an informal artist residency in a northeast Wisconsin village that a friend of mine ran at the time out of a former police station. His photos were included in one of the very first exhibitions I ever curated, and it’s been exciting to keep up with his work.

Pearce has a wonderfully insightful eye, capturing Midwest life from the perspective of someone who is familiar with its nuances and finds endless inspiration in its idiosyncrasies, turning the lens on rural places with curiosity and affection. I’m really excited to see this new publication by Deadbeat Club Press, High & Lonesome, which surveys pictures Pearce has made over the past several years, come together for his first monograph. Deadbeat Club and Pearce will be at Polycopies in Paris, which starts today and runs through November 12.

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…and now for this week’s roundup of exhibitions and opportunities for artists with deadlines coming up soon.