Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce My Country Has No Name,
an exhibition of pen ink drawings on paper, metallic marker drawings,
ink on black board and new lithographs by Toyin Odutola. Together, the
range of works represent Odutola's practice which is grounded in an
obsessively fine and meticulous application of line that has become the
specified visual language through which she explores the human form
as a landscape. My Country Has No Name is an exploration of identity
rooted in the friction created by hyphenated nationalities and a study
into what comes from a reconciliation of seemingly distant and
divergent cultural homes to form a new multilayered reality.
Her pen markings, dense and engraved, either stand alone or cover
kaleidoscopic color fields that emanate from within. The acute
depictions of skin and hair both portray the figure, often Odutola, as
well as reference scientific renderings of subdermal muscular structures.
While concerned with the historical representation of the black subject
in modern and contemporary portraiture, Odutola's focus shifts to the
transcendence of skin (color) and placement (origin), opening a field for
the viewer to place themselves in the work; finding spaces to belong or
to reject, to possess, to implant one's self or to find freedom from the
rejection of that space.
All These Garlands Prove Nothing is a series of self-portraits recording
the range of hairstyles donned by the artist. By isolating the figure
against the blank white background and repeating the subject, Odutola
is confining the differences mainly to the hair and position of the body.
The interest is less in style and more in the undertones and associations
this specific physical embellishment provides when thinking about the
pliability of identity. These works dance between the understandings of
one's own identity and the understanding of one's identity as it relates
what is being reflected back from another's gaze.
In Come Closer: Black Surfaces. Black Grounds, Odutola uses black ink
on black board to question the validity, the aesthetic and the meaning
of the material aspect of blackness and how those connotations feed
into social identities and as she describes, "a personal rejection of all the
ideas I associated with blackness in myself". The series Gauging Tone
employs the same black board, but instead of black ink, Odutola uses a
metallic Sharpie to cast lines and fill the negative space. Odutola
questions the inversion of her own aesthetic and in doing so looks
upon the equally problematic proposition of how black people see one
another.
Toyin Odutola, born in Nigeria, currently lives and works in Alabama.
Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States. Selected
group exhibitions include Ballpoint Pen Drawing Since 1950, Aldrich
Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, 2013; The Progress
of Love, Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, 2012-2013; and Fore and
Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New
York, 2012-2013. She is a recipient of the Murphy and Cadogan
Fellowship Award; Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship Grant, Yale/Norfolk;
and the Erzulie Veasey Johnson Painting & Drawing Award. She is
included in the public collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art,
Birmingham, Louisiana; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii
and The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
TEXT COURTESY OF:
Jack Shainman Gallery 20th Street
513 W. 20th St.
New York, NY 10011
WEBSITE: [ Ссылка ]
EMAIL: info@jackshainman.com
PHONE: 212-645-1701
HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 6pm
VIDEO BY:
O'Delle Abney, Artist , Agent, Videographer
