Kirsten Nash’s paintings and watercolors of parking lots transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, the secular into the sacred as she invites us to linger and gaze upon these transitional surfaces, the liminal spaces where we are always leaving or arriving or waiting, where secret acts are conducted: the parking lot is never the final destination. Nash’s paintings evoke a deep spirituality in a space that is considered sterile. Her renderings of parking lot surfaces, particularly in their use of the grid, appear as a kind of codex representing mythic intersections, transforming the parking lot into an epicenter for physical, metaphysical, earthy and spiritual exchange. But the paintings are not wholly abstract in their connotations. There is an acute physicality to them as well. Parking lots become flesh, the skin scarred decoratively or marked by some unnamed trauma or wound. There is a biomorphic quality to these paintings, the primordial ooze of tar, repository of bones, ordered and codified into a smooth asphalt surface.
In Nash’s hands, one is struck by how simply beautiful and haunting the parking lot is. In one painting the parking lot is lit by a field of fallopian lights—creating a generative feminine space, almost delicate. Simultaneously, the painting offers us a vision of a wounded site at the edge of the city, a place of skulls where the lights take on the look of crucified saints there to be watched by passers by. The perspective is often from above—who is watching and who is being watched? Nash’s paintings paradoxically communicate excess and scarcity via absence: the empty parking is a primary image of luxury, an open unused space in a world where space is at a premium. At the same time the artist elegantly depicts emptiness, the landscape’s open meadow replaced by an empty parking lot or a parking lot of empty yet numinous cars. Nash applies the methods of landscape painting to non-natural settings. We see that which stands in for the modern landscape, the overlay of a once verdant expanse. The paintings call to the tension of what is underneath, a wilderness tamped down by the rationalist grid of the asphalt parking lot.

Catherine Bowman