Nancy Dwyer

While continuing to explore language and perception with her familiar word-objects, Nancy Dwyer’s paintings and sculptures employ vernacular graphic elements to conflate context & object. By manipulating scale, color and repetition- integrating printed wallpaper, abstract form and furniture-like elements- each part’s expected role is switched. This reversal of background and foreground- i.e. form and content- allows for a new way to ‘read’ the work and its meaning.

Dwyer’s recent sculpture continues to embrace a variety of materials that typify her affection for the proletarian and her commitment to the accessible. Since the mid-80s, she has sustained an interest in a text-based format for painting, sculpture and installation that has allowed her to explore its objective/subjective qualities. Interpretation of the work challenges the viewer to locate ‘voice’, as ambivalence seems to be at its core. A constant feature however has always been Dwyer’s critical eye on contemporary mediated experience and society, often expressed with an acerbic wit and dark humor.

Nancy Dwyer has exhibited internationally since the early ‘80s. A core member of the Pictures Generation, she was also a cofounder of Hallwalls, the non-profit organization created as a cooperative for artists in Buffalo, NY in 1974. She is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of Vermont, Burlington. Dwyer has exhibited extensively, most recently with a retrospective in 2013 at the Fisher Landau Center in Long Island City, NY. She has been included in exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Omi Fields Sculpture Park in Ghent, NY, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Kunstverein Frankfurt in Germany, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among many others.