Duet: Strange Attractor

Responding to the curatorial concept of Duet, Pace is pleased to present a thematic pairing of artists Nina Katchadourian and Matthew Day Jackson, titled Strange Attractor.

The California-born artists, despite drastically different approaches to medium and scale, have shared interests in the duality of beauty and horror, mundaneness and fantasy, nature and its simulacrum, utopia and dystopia.

The “strange attractor” is a concept in chaos theory that describes dynamic systems that are paradoxically chaotic locally yet stable in overall, global patterns—set in motion by key initial conditions. Its mathematical expression often resembles a butterfly, hence the popular moniker “butterfly effect,” often linked to modeling natural phenomena, like atmospheric convection. As a conceptual framework, it poetically encapsulates the artists’ sprawling, discursive interests in myriad natural and manmade phenomena that shape the human experience.

Matthew Day Jackson’s floral still life made with Formica and other unconventional materials—like fiberglass cloth and lead—are placed in conversation with Nina Katchadourian’s fake plant. Made at the onset of the pandemic in her Berlin apartment, these sculptures are constructed with mundane materials like discarded cardboard boxes, paper packaging from food products, disposable medical masks, cardboard toilet paper tubes, ping pong balls, sewing pins, toothpicks, and leftover craft supplies.

Since 1993, Nina Katchadourian has explored the libraries of acquaintances, artists, writers, and institutions as part of her ongoing Sorted Books project. Katchadourian carefully selects books and arranges them into stacks so that their titles can be read in sequence from top to bottom. These book “clusters,” as she calls them, are still-life photographs, sculptures, portraits, and poems that playfully reveal the unexpected connections tucked away on our bookshelves.

Humor and tension permeate the two artists’ surreal “monuments” that comment on certain existential conditions. Nina Katchadourian’s collage of a monumental garden sculpture, Topiary, made from found materials during a flight (like olives), forms a dramatic counterpart to Matthew Day Jackson’s Reliquary for Trinitite, a cast bronze sculpture in the form of entwined thistle plants that enshrines a piece of trinitite—the unique substance created by the first atomic bomb explosion.

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