Dangerous Games: Navin Norling

Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Dangerous Games, an exhibition of new works by Navin Norling, on view February 27 - March 28.

This exhibition emerges from a moment defined by uncertainty, repetition, and historical amnesia. Dangerous Games takes its title from a lowbrow French comic book from the 1960s, a phrase that initially appealed to the artist for its cinematic quality. Over time, the words took on greater weight, becoming a way to describe the social and political conditions shaping contemporary American life today. These are dangerous times, and the systems we move through every day increasingly feel like games whose rules are unstable and unevenly enforced.

Working with found materials such as old windows, scrap wood, metal, lace, and everyday objects, Norling builds layered works that reference American iconography while questioning the narratives attached to it. His use of salvaged materials connects the work to folk traditions and to street art, which he understands as a contemporary form of folk expression. Familiar surfaces and objects create an entry point, disarming the viewer through nostalgia and material recognition before revealing more complex and troubling histories beneath.

A central strategy in the exhibition is whitewashing. Surfaces are painted white, obscuring imagery and meaning, only to be scraped back, cut into, or partially removed. This process mirrors the ongoing erasure of history and culture, particularly Black and diasporic histories, within American public discourse. Lace overlays and quilt-like panels further complicate visibility, softening the surface while concealing what lies beneath. What disappears does not vanish completely. It returns in fragments, inversions, and shadows.

Quilting functions as both a formal and conceptual framework throughout the exhibition. Panel compositions read as quilts, using color blocks, patterning, and coded symbolism. These references draw on African American quilting traditions as systems of communication, survival, and resistance. Rather than producing literal quilts, Norling translates their logic into painting, sculpture, and installation, folding personal history, including the influence of his grandmother, into the work.

Recurring figures and symbols populate Dangerous Games: the Watcher, a Black Americana figure whose shifting gaze suggests both witness and surveillance; red, white, and blue wrestlers; angry white men; children, cherubs, dragons, charms, and amulets. Gumball machines dispense red pills, introducing chance and participation while underscoring the exhibition’s framing of power as play. These elements move across works like a visual language, accumulating meaning through repetition.

The exhibition also references the upcoming semiquincentennial of the United States. Red, white, and blue appear throughout the work, not as celebration but as coded reference. Norling looks at America through an American lens shaped by travel, history, and lived experience, examining gun violence, militarization, and the persistent myth-making that allows these realities to continue. His work resists direct political messaging, instead offering layered, coded forms of protest that speak to the present while remaining rooted in a longer historical continuum.

- Karen Comer Lowe, 2026