The Pit is pleased to present Harder Volumes, a new solo exhibition by Los Angeles based Nora Shields.  This is Shields’ second exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be open to the public from January 6 – February 17th, 2019, with an opening reception on Sunday January 6 from 4-7pm.

For Harder Volumes, Shields has constructed a new series of metal wall-bound sculptures and reliefs. Although fundamentally sculptural, her reliefs have a direct conversation with the history of painting, and are encountered from a frontal perspective eschewing the normal foundation of form in the round as the basis for sculpture.  These new brightly colored and patterned metal abstractions take a turn from her past works which used more soft materials such as paper and textiles, in favor of riveted and painted metal surfaces. The armatures which her composed abstractions are attached to are both a support system and introduce movement through the line not found elsewhere in the works.  Shields’ second exhibition with The Pit furthers her ongoing investigation into cross over between fine art, design, architecture, and the act of arrangement.

“Shields creates visual velocity and compositional depth through color as well as through patterning, often channeling stripes or polkadots, for example, into otherwise solid colored, planar disks, fans, and curls of surface. She is fascinated by bas relief’s ability to, as she said in studio visit, “move into space but to deal in pictures.” Shields’ sculptures, as small architectural feats, invite one to guess at armature and sequence of assembly. When asked about her process, which involves ripping, tearing, cutting, balancing, draping, folding, and riveting that all feels fast and intuitive, yet highly engineered for fortification—the sculptures appear well-built as if they’d survive being hurled across a room—Shields called it a balance between “

-Excerpt from Trinie Dalton’s essay Electric Banquet