Nora Shields: Thresholds
May 14 - June 25, 2022
The Pit Los Angeles

The Pit is pleased to announce the gallery’s third solo exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Nora Shields. In Thresholds works are made of stone and metals - bent, welded, painted, and combined by Shields into interlocking shapes and large-scale abstractions. Using a color palette drawn from natural and artificial worlds, which she approximates using industrial-grade automotive paint, her lyrical works make powerful statements about the role of ornamentation in the constitution of form. Airbrush, often relegated to the masculine realm of gadget-fetish, is stripped of its gendered identity as she perfects her craft in a car painting spray booth.

Shields interrogates the notion of “rooms” as psychological and theatrical spaces. She has created a group of terrazzo pedestals, and marble benches in visual dialogue with wall pieces. This immersive environment allows these objects to expand in their functions, letting us see their organic patterns as abstractions in themselves. In addition to a long held fascination with the sculptural processes associated with Minimalism and Pattern and Decoration, Shields’ works engage with a lineage of decorative symbols often associated with textiles and the ceremonial – fans, sashes, and other trappings of heraldry – amalgamating conventionally feminine motifs with traditionally masculine materials and artmaking methodologies. Eliciting moods and sensations of touch and feeling via dramatic configurations of materials, Shields refers to the relation of heavy stone forms juxtaposed by colorful bent metal forms: “The ‘drape’ throughout art history has always fascinated me. Consider Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Theresa, where the pleats and folds of drapery on ancient stone bodies are erotic. I’m dreaming of the cold stone against my body. But stone is also what bodies in classical sculpture are made from, like the material choices in architectures that signify power.”

Shields gives rise to works that effortlessly exist in the spaces between divergent ideas. Between painting and sculpture, between design and fine art, between strength and fragility, where glossy paint creates mirrors that blend subjectivity and objectivity, where folds in metal allow the viewer to simultaneously see inside and outside, and where the viewer becomes the protagonist.

For more information please email info@the-pit.la