Yanique

Yanique Norman
See Me Get Fat in your Feral Sun
October 13-December 1, 2018
Opening Saturday October 13, 4-6pm

Howard’s is pleased to present See Me Get Fat in your Feral Sun, a solo show by Atlanta based artist Yanique Norman. The show will run from October 13th- December 1st, 2018. The opening reception will be from 4-6 pm on Saturday, October 13th.

Yanique Norman’s installation includes drawings and paintings, combined with amorphous collage that fills and overtakes the gallery space. Rudimentary materials like Xerox, construction paper, gouache, oil, ink and graphite are spun together with dizzying orchestration. The work has sprung from a deep investigation into her own subconscious as well her lived experience as a Jamaican-American woman. Inspired by Tiffany Lethabo King’s concept of Black Fungibility, Norman finds a power, not in side-stepping history, but in a surreal and beautiful overpowering of it.

Yanique states, “Black Fungibility is a sort of reclamation project--a mode of critique in which one can reroute the lines of inquiry around humanist assumptions regarding blackness. It sees itself as having the ability to both transform inhospitable conditions of subjugation and refashion the tenor of abjection. It considers itself as abstract matter and adamantly believes that it can negotiate time space figurations on its own terms.”

The Exhibition title, and other works like I marched barefoot through your gardens so that I can devour your weeds and Woke up with a Mollusk Mind, borrow from the writings of Jamaican poet Safiya Sinclair, in which she masterfully untangles and complicates the notions of what is referred to as a civilized savage.

Countless multiple heads burst from Norman’s figures in all directions, like silver and dark gray fountains. The faces are powerful, looking at the viewer with an unflappable certainty and haunting anonymity. They sprout up and expand over and over again; their expressions pronouncing an inner state and life that in undeniable and large. It is an unstoppable growth of pure being-ness, imagination, beauty, and poetry.

Her figures shimmer and have a kinetic energy, invigorating the static nature of materials. They move in contrast to the austere postures of past American First Ladies, Jackie Kennedy and Frances Cleveland. References to African busts and masks connect unexpectedly to the statuesque stillness of their poses. The facade of American decorum, class, and history is yet another note in Norman’s impossibly complicated and personal dream.

 Yanique Norman lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. She was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, migrated to the United States at the age of 12, and was raised in New York City. She received a BFA from Georgia State University and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be found in numerous public collections including The High Museum of Art, Hammonds House Museum and Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. She had a project room show at the Atlanta Contemporary in 2017, and is currently included in Class Pictures at the Zuckerman Museum of Kennesaw State University.