N’Dorah | Braid and Weft: Twisting Codes of Beauty and Desire: Opening Reception: 6-8pm

251 W 19TH ST NEW YORK, NY 10011 18 November 2022 
251 W 19TH ST NEW YORK, NY 10011
Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Braid and Weft: Twisting Codes of Beauty and Desire, N’Dorah’s first solo exhibition in the United States. African of origin and in multiple vectors a veteran of the Parisian creative scene, N'Dorah crafts eloquently mimetic full-size objects out of human and artificial hair. They could be animal or abstract, supernatural, anthropomorphic or deceptively decorative, unfurling in dark, knotty outpourings that deploy traditional Afro techniques of braid and weft. Defiant and irreducible, her pieces seem to cross species and genres, evanescing three-dimensionally in place. Incarnations of sculpture, installation, and drawing challenge the viewer's ordered universe of assumptions – always in hair, dense or loose, centripetal, curlicued or linear. Are we looking at beauty or primeval effusion? At the texture or the depiction? We view a ritual skull, a hirsute armchair, a primate-like hanging – if we choose to see each piece in the realm of figuration. But they also could be, indeed always are, dense symbols denoting much else, intricate process and time and ritual. The process of braiding, the time in the process, the time of nature and of growing hair, the ritual of magic objects, fetishes.