I’ve known the artist No Land for over a decade and I have watched her develop and build a full body of work. Her aesthetic, much like her process, is a deeply organic one. It is refreshing to witness the creative work of an artist who displays no pretention, no cheap frills, nothing to distract ones attention beyond the aesthetic itself. And the work centers the human within a world of imagery, whether the palette is text, painting, drawing, film, or a polymathic synthesis of forms.
At the Off Paradise gallery near Canal Street, running in October and November 2024, No Land selected about two dozen visual works, some of which incorporated text. In thinking about how to characterize them, I must return to the term, organic, which is often bandied about in the art world. But with No Land, the term is quite literal in that she never incorporates a color that does not exist readily in the natural world, delving almost systematically into myriad shades of brown, edging into yellow, the shades of weathered paper, with the greatest contrast present in white upon black. The red of blood. Occasional silver or gold highlights. And her medium is often everyday materials, drawings or paint upon paper, rather than canvas; she works with video, text from a typewriter, giving the work a less formal and industrial quality, while embracing the real, the visceral, the ancient.
While No Land is known best as a poet, her visual art is no less developed within her corpus. There is an anthropogenic quality in the imagery: limbs emerging out of the ether of the page where we are only able to see part of this existence into which she invites us. These beings she depicts amidst a rippling fog of consciousness exist without ever resorting to vulgar distortion purely that would aim to obscure. Her images are practically moving on the paper and one gets the feeling that they are scrutinizing us as much as we are them. These are alternative perceptions of the world, but realities, not fantasies, that have us standing on solid ground, interacting and perceiving, sensing each other.
The explicit reason for the exhibit was to feature her co-authored, debut poetry collection with renowned beat poet, Anne Waldman, titled The Velvet Wire. No Land often presents her work in an improvised setting with musicians accompanying and improvising around and within her words. The everchanging nature of her performances seem built into the poems as they are displayed on the page. We are seeing them as a result of and in the constant process of evolution. Her work is alive, breathing and beating. One gets the feeling that they could have been displayed many different ways, that this is just one version of them, but one that has been done with a great deal of care for how every word appears on the pages, how they interact with the images that sometimes dwell alongside them in unity.
No Land’s video work was also displayed with equal measure. In this, she works consistently in white imagery saturated by black. While in her video work she seems to get the most autobiographical, we are left on the edge of something solemn and personal, sometimes mournful, filled with mysterious imagery that is enhanced by the silence.
No Land is one of New York’s most brilliant polymath artists who seems not to be bound by media whatsoever. She works from a bold, new perspective that she expresses across a vast array of pieces that live and breathe like art is meant to be. Galleries would be wise to embrace her work as this exhibition seems to only have shown us the tip of the iceberg.
Cover photo credit: Ariella Villefranche