Tameka Norris and Mark Jenkins

New York City

Our former interviewee, Mark Jenkins, currently presents his latest works together with American visual and performance artist, Tameka Norris. Entitled Unsupervised, their common show emphasizes their practices across a breadth of media: painting, sculpture, photography, and video. Both artists’ brash and witty styles draw attention to materials, process, and form, while addressing larger socio-cultural anxieties and concerns.

Norris’s paintings investigate the interrelationships of form and personhood. Norris mines her past and brings her experiences to the present through the found objects and performative marks she incorporates into her work. Her ‚Contrapposto‘ series — on view for the first time in Unsupervised — evidences the artist’s fascination with gesture and pose. Norris treats each stretcher like a human frame, draping them with sheer and patterned fabrics. These combinations of textiles blur the distinction between states of dress and undress and propose an exploration of the traditions of nudity, voyeurism, and portraiture in the history of painting.

Mark Jenkins has created sculptures in the streets and public spaces of cities around the world. He is most known for his cast human figures, built with clear packing tape, often dressed and contorted in uncanny ways. His installations subtly and humorously subvert the expected behaviors of people in the public sphere. Jenkins’s interventions turn urban spaces into a theatre in which passersby unknowingly become both the actors and the audience. His characters—ranging from animals and human babies to anthropomorphized street furniture—create a surrealist cityscape that prompts viewers to re-examine the everyday spaces one would normally take for granted.

Tameka Norris

Mark Jenkins

Lombard Freid Gallery

March 7 – April 13, 2013
518 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011
USA

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