11.17 — 12.21.24
Devening Projects is proud to present Rooms with Rooms and Games, Nathaniel Robinson’s fifth solo show at the gallery. The exhibition opens with a reception for the artist on Sunday, November 17th from 3 – 5pm. The exhibition will then continue until December 21st.
Rooms and Games
It is hard to know what to think.
There is such a thing as existing and experiencing existence. And there is the world which goes its own way heedlessly. Whether these are actually contradictory, I’m not sure. But it does confront me as puzzling, and as a stumbling block.
The figure feels the water flowing from the faucet, or feels for water which will not flow, or waits for the feeling of flowing water. The figures felt like a risk, which was good. They are acting within models, scenarios constructed like stage sets for perspicuous viewing from the outside. They are parts of a demonstration demonstrating experiences.
What this is for, and who this is for, is not clear to me. So it is difficult to know what to say about it. This is despite the fact that, from my own perspective, these current objects come from a direct, even crude and ruthless, way of making them mean what they mean.
Not knowing who or what this was for was an opportunity. This is possibly a reflection, or a case, of the opportunities present in this moment broadly, in a moment when the future has seemingly been removed and replaced with mere consequences.
When I call something something (like calling something a game), I mean that it is that and also that it isn’t that.
Call the whole game an elaboration on the semipermeable membrane, the primordial selective separation from the environment. Or rather, not to presuppose environment and self, the division of one reality into two environments, one surrounding the other, and the maintenance of that distinction. Not a simple distinction, but a distinction conditioned on connection conditioned on separation. You know what I mean. So it is a game with rooms. With a slight jolt I notice that, while looking up from the keyboard and thinking out my next words, I have been watching moths searching for openings in the nighttime window screen.
— Nathaniel Robinson, 2024
Nathaniel Robinson has had solo exhibitions at venues including Feature, Inc. and Magenta Plains in New York; Devening Projects and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Thomas Park in Seoul; Twig Gallery, Brussels; and Northwestern College, St Paul. He has participated in group exhibitions at On Stellar Rays, 33 Orchard, Martos Gallery, and White Columns in New York; Devening Projects, Heaven Gallery and Adds Donna in Chicago; the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College; as well as in Brussels, Dusseldorf, Leipzig, Melbourne, and Istanbul. In 2015 he was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2019 his work was included in the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. In 2022 he constructed an empty space with the aid of a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Often he has wondered if he has lived a skeleton’s life as a questioner of reality. His exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, The L Magazine, New City, and Art Ltd. Robinson lives and works in Brewster, New York. Born 1980, Cranston, RI; BA Amherst College, 2002; MFA The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2005.
