Yanique Norman: Blue to Green

In Gallery 1, Goldfinch is pleased to present Blue to Green, a solo exhibition of new multi-media works by Yanique Norman (b. 1981, Spanish Town, Jamaica). This is Norman's first exhibition in Chicago.

Yanique Norman constructs  fantastical, intricately layered spaces that explore the poetics of "Black Fungibility," which she describes as "an alternate dream model" that borrows ideas from mycology (the scientific study of fungi) to create complex and infinitely generative representations of Blackness that, in Norman's hands, may appear to be interchangeable, but are not. "Black Fungibility is an umbrella term which in its basic essence is tethering Blackness to an actual fungus," she explains. For Norman, the study of pathogens and fungi provide an imaginative means of looking at the ways in which "the physiognomy of the Black psychological body changes and adapts itself when placed in extreme whitened conditions." 

Blue to Green is divided into three parts, or as the artist frames them, three Acts, each Act articulated through a different medium: first drawings, then collage, and finally digital images.  Her three-dimensional collages take the form of a sinewy garden installation that vines its way across several gallery walls. Titled Monticello Plot (1-15), these works are a direct nod to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello gardens, a horticultural laboratory and experimental testing ground that depended upon the labor of enslaved Black people and families. The lower, hidden strata of these pieces are printed with a found mugshot of an incarcerated woman, which on the top layers has morphed into images of Norman herself. Thus this re-imagined Monticello is built upon a "daisy chain of copies" - a process which mimics some of the replicative and disseminative behaviors of pathogens, chytrids, and nomadic fungi while taking forms that recall those of cora lichen or the gills of a chanterelle mushroom, as well as flowers and garlands.

Lining the wall opposite the Monticello Plots, a set of framed digital images explores themes of alienation and Black embodiment through a series of altered likenesses of former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. This suite of prints--part of Norman's ongoing FFLOTUS series (Former First Ladies of the United States)--appears as a set of formal portraits of Eisenhower, who served as First Lady from 1953 to 1961. Across these images, Eisenhower wears several different blue and green-hued ball gowns and assumes a variety of physical poses. On the face of it, they read as pictures of a smiling, lushly garbed, middle-aged white woman who stood in proximity to immense political power for many years, while never herself reaching the iconic status of an Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, or Michelle Obama. But as longer scrutiny reveals, none of these images are actually of Mamie, none are in fact "historical", and nothing we see and identify as "Mamie Eisenhower" is rooted in the real: not her hair, not her dresses, not her body or the poses she makes or the spaces she inhabits, not even her skin. She is purely a construction--a digital occupation of Mamie's body, if you will, by the artist herself, who has melded aspects of her own hair, skin tone, body and physicality with Mamie's face (this, with assistance of editor Kaneesha Brownlee and technicians at Digital Arts Studio in Atlanta). Norman wryly describes this lengthy and involved process as a kind of "digital witchcraft."

"It is important to note that multiplicity here is not necessarily spelling redundancy," notes Norman. "Things appear to be the same but they truly are very different...like fingerprints...like snowflakes...like a grain of sand. They only make sense as a collective. . . .  (T)hese fungible multiplications are often illogical and make things less clear. Things are never what they seem."

Artist's Bio

Yanique Norman was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica and moved to Brooklyn, NY with her family at the age of 12. She is an Artadia Award winner (Atlanta, 2020). Norman earned a BFA at Georgia State University (2014) and an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018). She is a grantee from the National Museum of Women in the Arts Georgia grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency grant and the Susan Antinori Visual Artist grant. Her work is included in the collections of the High Museum, Hammonds House Museum, and Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. 

Image: Yanique Norman, MONTICELLO: PLOT 2, 2022. Found and reconstructed image tinted black and transferred onto watercolor papers with hand-cut and sculptural elements, colored xerox, collage, graphite and iridescent medium. 43 x 7 inches (109.2 x 17.8 cm).