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12/2/2014

Tameka Norris

Ronchini Gallery, London

Ronchini Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by New Orleans based artist Tameka Norris in collaboration with ARTNESIA. Norris’s multi-disciplinary practice includes performance, video, sound, photography, and installation.

The title of the show, Almost Acquaintances, references her relationship with New Orleans and presents a new series of paintings depicting buildings in Gulfport and Biloxi – Norris’s childhood home – and quintessential shotgun houses in New Orleans, where the artist lives and works. The works take on titles such as Ms. Rosie, Josephine, or Pass Rd that reference women in Norris’s family that have passed away or streets in the area.

A continuation of the artist’s Post-Katrina series, the works are built up mark by mark using oil paint on stretched fabrics in a colourful and impressionistic approach. Norris began the series in 2009 whilst living in Los Angeles but travelled to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi to take photographs for use as reference material. Though she experienced Katrina from the safety of the UCLA campus, she uses her family’s personal circumstance, such as her grandmother’s completely destroyed house, as a point of departure for her work. Norris explains:

‘’I was continually seeing familiar places from back home on the television and felt compelled to understand the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. It is traumatising watching something like that happening. Mississippi was simply flattened; just gone. Through the work I wanted to remember and remap those places so that they did not disappear. In a way, I wanted to place them somehow back into my world.”

Now that she has moved back to New Orleans and her studio and home is a shotgun house in the 9th Ward – an area famously devastated by Hurricane Katrina – her relationship to the site has changed. Her work investigates what is happening socially, physically and emotionally as the site undergoes gentrification. As the city changes as buildings are torn down and reconstructed, Norris’s previous references no longer exist, forcing her to draw on her memory, creating a more autobiographical reflection.

Painterly elements in the new work are often made in near-total darkness using only the light of a projector. The work can be identified as a psychotherapeutic process through which the artist strives to reinstate what is now gone; a mapping of the disappeared other. Yet the process is one that does not provoke the artist’s solidary reminiscence. To the contrary Norris sets out on a receptive journey where her assistants, some of which are students, and fellow artists, many of whom had to evacuate their houses during Katrina, share their experiences with her; all of which are aggregated in the overall outcome.

Norris seeks not to shock but to invite the viewer to be receptive in a non-predisposed manner where the work becomes classless and race-less. Scenes of devastations become an allegory to her non-canonical work. For Norris the mundane is often the source of artistic vivacity; streets, museum walls, her students, internet, nature, what the critics, fans, and “haterz” say, music, family, old journals from over the years, dreams and academic texts are all stimuli informing Norris’s artistic oeuvre.

In a video performance work the artist recreates Michelangelo Pistoletto’s sculpture Venus of the Rags, 1967 – 1974. The artist appears as the classical statue of the Roman goddess of fertility, positioned with her back to the viewer in front of a large pile of her own brightly coloured, discarded clothes heaped on the floor. By inserting herself – a black woman – into the dialogue about painting she forces a critique about the presence of the black body in the history of painting. After watching the video, Norris became disillusioned with the tattoos she has on her shoulder blades and decided to have them gradually removed as a way of becoming more like the timeless model of Venus. In doing so, the artist herself has become a work in progress, a reductive sculpture, instructed by the notions of perfection and classicism.

Norris is producing a feature length film/installation with artist Garrett Bradley, for Prospect 3 Biennial in New Orleans, in autumn 2014 curated by Franklin Sirmans. The film is in a documentary style with some scripted narrative, and is about Norris’s life as an artist. Elements of what happens at the Ronchini Gallery exhibition will translate into this film and vice versa. Future projects include an EP with original music created by Norris which will become the soundtrack of the film.

Tameka Norris received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles before graduating with an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2012. Her work can be seen in Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, until 9 March 2014. The exhibition chronicles the development of black performance art and was previously shown at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston in 2012. Whilst at UCLA, Norris transposed the language and aesthetic of hip hop onto the backdrop of her college campus. In the video Licker, 2010, Norris, in a bikini and fur coat raps, ‘I’m that black Cindy Sherman and that little Kara Walker, Basquiat resurrected from the dead…’ In her 2012 video series she tracked her progression through the Yale School of Art in a savvy update on Alex Bag’s classic Untitled Fall’95. In another gesture of appropriation, Norris pairs Janis Joplin and Drake for Mercedes Benz-Successful, 2011. In 2013, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans : Tameka Norris – Family Values. The artist has participated in numerous important group exhibitions including Radical Presence, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2012); Gifted and Talented, Third Streaming Gallery, New York (2012); Prospect.2 Biennial, New Orleans (2011); QueerSexing, Human Resources, Los Angeles (2011); Prospect.1.5 Biennial, Good Children Gallery, New Orleans (2010); Open Projector Night, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2009);True Diva Biennale, Skowhegan, Maine (2009); Dissent! 1968 to Now, Laband Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles (2008).





ARTNESIA is an arts projects initiative set up in 2010 by Jason Lee and Carlo Berardi. Its main activities are curatorial projects around the globe, artists’ residencies and representations as well as book publishing. Artnesia’s activities started with Heavenly Creatures, a group exhibition in partnership with Jack Wills at the Aubin Gallery, followed by Confessions of Dangerous Minds, a comprehensive survey of Contemporary Art from Turkey at Saatchi Gallery, London, in 2011. They presented TIME, after TIME: Parallels Between Young American Artists and Italian Masters (2012) and Rebecca Ward: cow tipping (2013) both at Ronchini Gallery.

Ronchini Gallery is a contemporary art gallery founded by Lorenzo Ronchini in 1992 in Umbria, Italy, which relocated to Mayfair, London in February 2012. The gallery aesthetic is defined by Minimalism, Spatialism, Conceptualism and Arte Povera and it retains an unblinking future-focus on progressive movements whilst remembering the past. Its exhibitions have explored pioneering movements across a broad spectrum of contemporary artistic practice. Working with acclaimed curators and scholars from across the world, the gallery provides a rigorous context in which its artists can be viewed. The gallery has recently begun working with an international group of younger artists including Adrien Broom, Jacob Hashimoto, Adeline de Monseignat, Berndnaut Smilde and Rebecca Ward. It aims to discover and rediscover exceptional artists and through its secondary market programme Ronchini Gallery’s objective is to inspire the next generation of young artists. Paterfamilias Adriano Ronchini was an early supporter of artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Daniel Buren, Joseph Kosuth, Frank Stella and Michelangelo Pistoletto and collected their work throughout the seventies; Ronchini Gallery evolved from these years of private collecting. The gallery maintains a successful publishing arm, which produces exhibition catalogues, monographs, critical texts and artist’s books.

Image: Tameka Norris, Bernadine, 2014, oil paint, and acrylic paint on fabric, 52 x 82 in

For press information and images please contact:
Sophie Campos or Tefkros Christou at Pelham Communications
Tel: +44 (0)20 8969 3959
Email: sophie@pelhamcommunications.com or tefkros@pelhamcommunications.com

Opening Reception: Thursday 13 February, 6 – 8pm

Ronchini Gallery
22 Dering Street, London
Opening Hours: Monday – Friday 10am – 6pm; Saturday 11am – 5pm
Admission free

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