Lombard Freid Gallery presents New Orleans-based artist Tameka Norrisʼs first solo show in New York. The exhibition features Norris a.k.a. Meka Jeanʼs most recent paintings, video-monologues, and a live musical performance the night of the opening. Too Good For You presents a range of work from Norrisʼs multitalented artistic practice which is rooted in hip-hop and pop culture, art history, and the regional iconography of the American South. Imbued with autobiography, Norrisʼs paintings and video works explore her deep and personal relationship to the post-Katrina landscape of New Orleans and the houses and neighborhoods of her childhood.
Norrisʼs Post-Katrina works are physical and painterly, created as patchworks of fabrics and images that grapple at reconstructing memories of the ravaged areas of New Orleans, Biloxi, and Gulfport, regions now in the midst of rapid gentrification. In her own words:
The work is very much informed by the location because itʼs about a character— Meka Jean, an alter ego of mine—as sheʼs becoming acquainted again with [her] home after itʼs been destroyed and is being rebuilt…Through the work I wanted to remember and remap those places so that they do not disappear. In a way, I wanted to place them somehow back into my world.
Painting on stitched fabrics—combining West African block prints, bed sheets, a Care Bear, the Piggly Wiggly supermarket mascot, the American flag—Norris stretches and drapes these varied textiles over exposed wooden stretchers to form structures that in turn reveal and disguise their construction. The diptych Open House (2014) is three- dimensional, comprised of two stretchers resting against each other, forming a freestanding installation in the middle of the main gallery. As New Orleans changes and as buildings are torn down and reconstructed, Norrisʼs references no longer exist, forcing her to draw on her memory, creating a more autobiographical reflection.
Recently, Norris has been closely identified with her notorious performance shown at Performa 13 and as part of the Radical Presence exhibition at The Studio Museum of Harlem, where she cut her tongue with a knife and dragged her mouth along the wall, creating a paint-like smear. Norrisʼs video and performance work (which has garnered a significant following on YouTube) is represented in the exhibition by her Yale School of Art (2010-12) series, which features Norris recounting her own experiences as a black women studying at Yale's renowned MFA program, resulting in humorous (and often seemingly schizophrenic) personae. Simultaneously hilarious and scathing, Norris's videos address the contradictions of contemporary arts education and the expectations produced by the history of identity politics. Norris riffs on the ostentation and exaggeration of hip-hop artists and reality TV stars, further exposing the increased pressure of superstardom in today's art world.
In conjunction with the opening of Too Good For You, Norris will perform covers, mash- ups, and original songs as Meka Jean, the protagonist of a film she is currently producing for this year's Prospect 3 Biennial, curated by Franklin Sirmans. Meka Jean: How She Got Good follows Norrisʼs alter ego who is also rediscovering her home after its destruction and reconstruction.
-Lombard Freid Gallery
Image: © Tameka Norris
Courtesy of the artist and Lombard Freid Gallery
