Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present If a Tree Falls, an exhibition of new work by Nick Cave, bookending the artist’s spring presentations in New York. If Weather or Not (Jack Shainman Gallery, May 17 – June 23, 2018) was the visual manifestation of states of mind, and The Let Go(Park Avenue Armory, June 7 – July 1, 2018) an expression of states of being, If a Tree Falls explores a crucial underlying component of these personal and collective states – the state of the American nation.
BEHIND THE SCENES OF NICK CAVE’S THE LET GO
By Niama Safia Sandy
By nearly all accounts, this American moment is one characterized by deep turmoil. Political chicanery. Gun violence. Racial discrimination. Gender-based violence. Police brutality. Education reform. On any given day, there is some permutation of those things permeating the news cycle.
Artists often become the standard-bearers leading the way toward a kind of soft reset—devising visual strategies and physical embodiments toward new methodologies for reckoning and—in the case of the latest project by Nick Cave (NA 2015), The Let Goat Park Avenue Armory in New York—release.
Nick Cave Lets Go in a Performance that Is Part Confession, Part Celebration, Hyperallergic
by Seph Rodney
In “The Let Go” at the Park Avenue Armory, the artist explores jubilation washed with spectacle and an undertow of anguish.
Sometimes on a Sunday, in the morning hours when the grass is still wet, and the city street is mostly quiet, people rise and dress, and gather in a church to sing, to dance, and to clap their hands. Sometimes the hymns are sung low and throbbing like an earth tremor and sometimes they emerge strained and agonized, screeching and searching. Sometimes an organ marks the path to ecstasy, or a drum circle, or a fully electrified band, or just a group of singers coordinated in matching outfits and choreographed formation.
The Power of Nick Cave, The Know
@FashionationAnxiety
In 1995 the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was asked about the evolution of religion. He simply went on to say that someday churches will be replaced by great dance halls, places for parties. As I see it, the artist Nick Cave—who created the ultimate performance series The Let Go—has just fulfilled Jodorowsky’s prophecy.