I’ve been holding back on the Nolandposting since I have yet to see the show, but a couple of people now have noticed what feels likely to be my favorite thing about it: the little scale models of Noland’s artworks.
They’re tools for designing shows, of course, but here, they’re also elements of a larger work, Untitled (2025). It’s a recursive work made of works and arrangements of works, arranged on a tabletop, in a gallery, Cady Nolands all the way down.
The main element, the architectural model, is of the Gagosian space itself, and shows a selection of works that only loosely maps to what ended up there. Just outside the gallery wall are models of the two printed vinyl mats that fill the floor of the left gallery.
Meanwhile, I dutifully copied the entire caption and description on this, and it’s still incomplete. Artist Devin Mitchell’s IG post of a detail shows that the acrylic crate contains, not 3D printed objects, but models handmade from painted wood, twine, print-on-foamcore, and rolls of tape? More interestingly, these are also the works that filled the larger of Noland’s two Pavilion galleries at Glenstone last year. It references the past as well as the future/now-present, but when you finally take delivery of it, it will all be the past, and an alternate version of it at that.
This all sticks out because of Noland’s reputation for particularity about how her work is installed. But also because her last two shows in NYC reportedly involved her turning the gallery into an ersatz studio, taking it over as she worked out the specifics of what works to include, and where to put them. She was deeply involved in the Glenstone installation, too, fabricating walls and adding new works and objects right down to the last minute. And now her Polaroids book includes many glimpses of work in process, in variation, and in the studio, not just in the perfectly composed confines of a gallery.
These works Noland presents seem to refer to her own process, the details of her studio practice. The table itself feels like it could have been lifted straight from Noland’s studio. It all feels revelatory, a glimpse into the making of her work. Or it could all be a simulacrum, a double, a concoction of a space and moment in Noland’s process. When I first saw the pictures, I excitedly assumed it’s real, documentary, not fiction. But I don’t know how we’d know.
What does feel real, though, is the way this crate of Noland models rewrites the narrative of all the other crates of stuff she’s made and shown over the years. If they didn’t feel like collections of the artist’s objects, or instant snapshots of a moment or event, or assembled portraits before, they sure do now.
[next morning update: @belcimer notes the table and chairs are the same models used at Gagosian 24th St, so studio and gallery are still one. Peter mentions Boîte-en-Valise, and I think we’re closing in.]