November 1 - January 12, 2025
From the Nasher Sculpture Center:
“The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Nasher Public: Frances Bagley, featuring Shangri-La (2020-24), a poetically disorienting installation comprised of abstracted figures, images, and found objects within an enveloping structure. The exhibition will be on view from November 1, 2024 to January 12, 2025.
For over four decades, artist and long-time Dallasite Frances Bagley has created a multivalent sculptural language through her objects, installations, and lens-based media. Bagley is a founding member of the feminist collective Toxic Shock, a Dallas-based group of women artists established in 1980 with whom Bagley has made works commenting on gender, politics, and identity. Her practice continues to explore contemporary social issues and dynamics, particularly relating to the gendered body. Often using cast body forms as well as ambiguously feminine signifiers like braided hair or draped fabric, Bagley creates a tension between the figurative and abstract. In recent years, Bagley has begun to incorporate enterable structures in her installations to create an architecture that bridges the viewer’s world and the surreal universe that her organic forms and enchanted objects inhabit.
Shangri-La combines both immersive and closed spaces to describe an unreachable utopia. Originally exhibited in State of the Art 2020 at the Momentary, a contemporary art space at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, Shangri-La was intended to evoke a sense of the confusion that Bagley sees as pervasive to contemporary life. The work remained on view for only a few weeks due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has been re-imagined for its display at the Nasher to reflect the intensified collective disorientation of the intervening four years.
Three larger-than-life figures made of cast and carved industrial spray foam on metal supports populate the ghostly outline and windows of a pitch-roofed house. While their bases retain Bagley’s pencil lines and carving marks, their upper surfaces are coated in a mat chalked paint that has been meticulously sanded to give the impression of translucently pale flesh. The visible hand of the artist and the process of their making, as well as their tender corporeality, lends these featureless and partially limbless figures a powerful vulnerability. Their form is reminiscent of classical sculpture, white-washed and degraded by time, as well as the feminine poses of milky, Rubenesque women from Renaissance painting or Bernini marbles. The postures of these creatures and the uneven surface of the spray foam also call to mind the helplessly frozen victims of Pompeii. A fourth and fifth figure can be found in the two illusory spaces of Shangri-La, which disorder the scale of the environment. One is reproduced crawling away from the viewer at nearly life-size in a large-format photograph, through the open door of Bagley’s studio at night – a beckoning portal to a real place. The other is a miniature and more abstract version of its oversized counterparts on the floor of the space. Inside a dollhouse-like version of Shangri-La’s architectural framework, suspended from its metal tubing, sits a twisted plaster element in front of a piece of cypress wood with a void that makes it appear to be a dwelling or another open door.
Navigating through the space without a clear vantage point, one is unsure if they are inside or outside, big or small. That absorbing experience puts the viewer in a position as vulnerable, anonymized, and headless as Bagley’s chalky figures stuck in time. Adding to the disorientation of scale, space, and identity in Shangri-La are a number of spirit levels affixed to the upright metal framework, which comment on the balance or imbalance of this paradisical environment. At the ‘back’ of the house, a vertical column of film stills closely cropped to the eyes and nose bridges of several of Bagley’s friends and family returns the viewer’s gaze. Without any other features, the subjects of these portraits are nearly impossible to identify. The struggle in Shangri-La to search for balance, security, connection, and ports of access are resonant in our tumultuous era. As many categories of our lives – work, healthcare, identity, home – have been unsettled in the wake of the pandemic and amidst transformative political and technological shifts, Bagley’s installation creates an emotional space for reflection.”
On View: November 1, 2024 | 12–5 pm
2001 Flora Street
Dallas, 75201 TX
(214) 242-5100
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