NOEL ANDERSON
SEPTEMBER 5 – October 12, 2013
RECEPTION: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 6–8 PM
Tilton Gallery is pleased to present Noel Anderson’s second solo exhibition at Tilton Gallery. A reception for the artist will take place on Thursday, September 5th from 6 to 8 pm.
For this exhibition Noel Anderson focuses his attention on performances and on black male bodies as performers. Expressed through a figurative book entitled Mascuminity, this show, aptly named “Ch. 26: He’s a Magik Men”, utilizes diverse mediums of painting, photography, printmaking, and woven tapestries to achieve a critical perspective on black masculinity.
Initially guided by self-constructed sociograms, Anderson’s textual maps assist in weaving connections between subjects as disparate as O.J. Simpson’s infamous Bronco chase, and New Age aura photography. These social maps assist in extending the edges of black maleness through processes of association.
Themes that he attempts to marry range from: disembodiment, replication and reproduction as tools of self-criticality, to historical relationships between painting, photography, printmaking, and tapestries, the metaphorical concerns of modernist geometry, and the synonymity of image-identity construction.
Anderson expresses his interest in replication – literally meaning to turn back on itself – in Bent Hoop. Bent toward the foot of the basketball hoop, this piece displays a literal “bending back-on-itself,” as well as the use of perverse geometry as a mechanism of extension. By association, viewers further find the “bending” of replication in N(ic)ole Brown Simpson. Anderson has taken a gender “bending” photograph dressed as murder victim Nicole Brown Simpson.
Through N(ic)ole Brown Simpson one can make connections to Noel Anderson’s investigation of disembodiment, as it appears as if Anderson’s head is suspended without body. This theme is further addressed in the physicalized, suspended woven tapestries and Astroturf pieces. The materiality and presentation of these pieces echoes the historically physical performance of and by black male bodies: as athletes, as lynched victims.