The success of Street has encouraged Nares in recent years to “revisit my old art-making process of doing whatever came to mind,” she says. “I’d always been doing different things but not showing them, because I was concentrating on painting.”

In 2013, Nares debuted her “Road Paint Paintings,” a series of black-and-white works created with a road-line painter that she found and bought online, having long been fascinated with the machines. The paint, actually a melted thermoplastic, is thick on the canvas, and dusted before it dries with tiny glass beads made to reflect headlights in the dark. From certain angles, the works glitter. “There’s a toughness to the road paintings,” Taubin says, an uncompromising solidity that provides ballast to the often weightless brushstroke works and the similarly floating Street.

Continuing in this vein, in 2019 Nares began making “Monuments,” a series of wax rubbings of 19th-century sidewalk stones in downtown Manhattan that are gilded with 22-karat gold leaf. Cut from granite, with grooves hand-chiseled into them to keep pedestrians from slipping and worn soft over time, the blocks offer a variety of alluring textures and patterns.

“Monuments” is obliquely political—a tribute to the “anonymous immigrant laborers who built the city,” Nares says, and made by an immigrant herself at a time of heightened anti-immigration actions and rhetoric. The gilded pieces (commemorating Gilded Age construction, Nares points out) recast those laborers humble work as an inscrutable, awesome achievement from a long-ago civilization. They’re another record of movement in the artist’s catalog, enshrining a form of communication, however obscure, from an increasingly distant past. In making their marks, the workers “inevitably fell into patternmaking,” Nares says, “because that’s what people do.

“There’s something very intimate about that. It’s like a little trace or something.”

Features

A feature from the spring/summer 2022 ‘Visual Arts Journal’