"Nothing went to waste; everything that could be used, reused, or repurposed was." Such was life on the family farm, recalls Navin Norling. Growing up in Oakland, California, the multimodal artist regularly visited a relative's farm on the outskirts of the city. This frugal mindset informs Norling's artistic practice to this day, exemplified in his upcoming solo exhibition at Johnson Lowe Gallery in Buckhead. Dangerous Games continues Norling's use of salvaged materials, this time with a few exciting twists.
The artist, now based in Atlanta, began his artistic practice on the West Coast. After earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the California College of Arts in 1995, Norling spent whatever time he wasn't working in his studio supporting community arts organizations, mentoring young people and guiding them toward higher education. In the late 90's, following the advice of his friend and former profesor, the late artist Raymond Saunders, Norling relocated to New York City to pursue his Master of Fine Arts at Hunter College. He spent two decades in the city, "doing the artist thing," as he puts it, exhibiting in galleries and attending residences, including a 2008 stint at the renowned Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
With an established career and his work collected by private individuals and institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, Norling had no plans to leave New York. But in the late 2010s, SCAD reached out to offer him a professor position at the Atlanta campus. Eager to continue his early passion for mentoring, Norling leapt at the opportunity, moving to Atlanta in 2018.
His professorship at SCAD, where he teaches foundation studies, may have brought him here, but "it's the community that has kept me here," Norling says. "In Atlanta, you go to a party and see artists, musicians, and dancers all together," a kind of cross-disciplinary blending he says reminds him of Oakland in the early 1990s.
In Norling's practice, rural meets urban, nostalgia meets contemporaneity, and Americana meets reality. Many of his pieces begin with salvaged objects; Norling is partial to windowpanes, often patching dozens of panes together with other elements such as panels of plywood and discarded metal signage. He then paints atop this unruly amalgam, adding images and icons from dated storefont signage and dollar signs to the American flag-- a mishmash of signifiers that mimics the true nature of American identity. "In my work, I want to put things in plain view to disarm the viewer," he says.
In Dangerous Games, Norling takes these sculptural paintings in new directions. Mounted large vertical windows, for instance, are kinetic, activated when viewers spin them. Also on view are several soft sculptures that play on the United States' obsessive gun culture. Images of firearms are printed on sleeves of fabric stuffed with batting, which are then stuffed into a frame, crumpling and squishing the plush guns-- a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the toxic masculinity typically associated with these weapons.
In his practice, Norling says, he is "cursing and preaching at the same time." The dissonance, created from contradictory and overlapping symbols, is precisely the point.
