This new untitled body of work builds on Green’s years-long practice of scrap metal assemblage, including two recent bodies of work conceived for his 2024 exhibition LACK at Ramiken in New York. In addition to welded, wall-supported vertical reconfigurations of gun components, Green also made a group of freestanding towers. These totems were made of salvaged servo motors, a sophisticated element used in cars, robotics, and industrial manufacturing. By contrast, the metal that composes Green’s body of work at the Nasher are of unspecified origin and function, chosen as the cheapest stock available at the scrapyard Green frequented; as most of the pieces are cast iron, they aren’t possible to weld together or significantly alter. Progressing in his choice of material from the conceivably useful to the abstractly mechanical, these scraps evoke a longer history of technology and its accelerating obsolescence.
Though they connect with a contemporary practice of artists salvaging industrial and consumer waste, Green’s sculptures have a trans-historical resonance that strongly recalls mid-20th-century Modernist sculpture as well as prehistoric forms of making, both personal and monumental. Louise Bourgeois’s early autobiographical carved-wood “Personages;” Thaddeus Mosely’s jazz-inspired totems made from fallen trees foraged around Pennsylvania; Isamu Noguchi’s self-supporting constructions as well as later works in rough-hewn stone; and most importantly for Green, Constantin Brancusi’s vertiginous Endless Column are all reflected in the formal qualities and methodologies of Green’s cairns. Likewise, artists of this period chiefly including Brancusi looked back towards Neolithic and prehistoric monuments that predate hand-sculpting and casting, which were created with locally abundant materials erected using the forces of human strength, weight, and balance. According to the same alchemical principles, Green’s totems leverage the density and heaviness of their materials to create verticality and lightness, and act like a mirror to the viewer’s own body.
Green came to visual art from his background as a sound engineer, and these cairns were erected improvisationally, through an intuitive series of sequential ‘moves.’ Green likens this process to building a looping music track with a MIDI sequencer, a tool used to separate audio into distinct channels that can be layered, edited, and rearranged. Given its particular character and balance, each element was chosen in reaction to the previous one on the stack to achieve height and proportion. Viewed together, the works have a choreographic rhythm. Hanging on the wall alongside his sculptures is a musical score for a four-piece drum set that can be performed with any available materials and a set of instructions given by Green: “REPEAT / LOOP / FIND YOUR GROOVE / SET YOUR OWN TEMPO."
This is the second presentation by Oshay Green as part of Nasher Public. From 2021-22, Green installed Mundane Egg, a welded-steel mandorla containing pieces of obsidian, outside The Power Station in Dallas’s Fair Park neighborhood.
About Oshay Green
Oshay Green (b.1994, Dallas) is a self-taught artist whose work develops through improvisation, sequence, and rhythm. He works with a variety of materials to explore how matter carries resonance–how forms, like sounds, move between presence and absence. Each piece unfolds through a process of transformation and response, where one gesture determines the next. By transmuting elements, Green blurs the boundary between structure and perception. Familiar forms take on new, uncertain qualities through subtle shifts in tone, balance, and proportion. Guided by repetition and intuition, Green creates works that exist between object and echo–exploring how memory, perception, and frequency intersect within material experience. His work is represented by Dvir Gallery in Paris and Ramiken in New York, and has been exhibited at CLEARING, Los Angeles (2024), Blinkers, Winnipeg (2022), The Power Station, Dallas, as part of Nasher Public (2021-22), and the Dallas Museum of Art (2020).