Ronchini Gallery is pleased to present Tameka Norris' first European solo exhibition in collaboration with Artnesia.

Working across a wide range of media, including performance, video, photography, and installation, Norris' practice addresses issues of space and the body. Norris lives and works in New Orleans.

In new large-scale paintings, the artist continues her Post-Katrina series, which she began in 2009, depicting houses in Gulfport and Biloxi - Norris' childhood home - and shotgun houses in New Orleans. The works are built up mark by mark using oil paint on stretched bed-sheets in a colourful and impressionistic style. Norris began the series whilst living in Los Angeles as a student 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 used her family's personal circumstance as a point of departure for the work. Now that Norris has moved back to New Orleans and her studio and home is a shotgun house in the 9' 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' previous references no longer exist, forcing Norris to draw on her memory, creating a more autobiographical reflection.

In a video performance work the artist recreates Michelangelo Pistoletto's sculpture Venus of the Rags, 1967 — 1974. Norris 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. Out of camera shot, an accented male voice directs the artist 'move your body, a little more to left'. Venus serves as an iconic motif of the canon of Western art and invokes Italy's cultural past in an ironic way. 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 two tattoos she has on her shoulder blades and has 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 reductive sculpture in an ongoing work.

Norris is producing a feature length film to be shown at a biennial in the USA in autumn 2014. The film is in a documentary style with some scripted narrative and is about Norris' life as an artist. Elements of what happens at the Ronchini Gallery exhibition will translate into this film and vice versa. Included in the Ronchini Gallery exhibition will be a video component in the form of a confessional monologue relating to the feature film.

She received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles before graduating with her 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, from 14 November 2013 - 9 March 2014. This includes a performance co-organised with Performa 13, New York's celebrated performance-art biennial. The exhibition chronicles the emergence and development of black performance art over three generations and was previously shown at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston in 2012.

For Norris' Senior Scholarship exhibition at UCLA she 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 Fa11'95. 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); and Dissent! 1968 to Now, Laband Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles (2008).

Ronchini Gallery
22 Dering Street
London W1S 1AN United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)20 76299188
info@ronchinigallery.com
www.ronchinigallery.com

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Related images

  • 1. Tameka Norris, Post Katrina 3, 127 x 88.9 cm, stretched bedsheet, oil paint, 2009, Courtesy the artist, Ronchini Gallery and Artnesia
  • 2. Tameka Norris, Post Katrina Self Portrait, digital print, variable dimensions, 2008, Courtesy the artist, Ronchini Gallery and Artnesia
  • 3. Tameka Norris, Post Katrina 3, 127 x 88.9 cm, stretched bedsheet, oil paint, 2009, Courtesy the artist, Ronchini Gallery and Artnesia
  • 4, 5 & 6. Tameka Norris, The Watermelon Series, video stills, digital print, variable dimensions, 2008, Courtesy the artist, Ronchini Gallery and Artnesia