My Country Has No Name
May 16 – June 29, 2013
Opening reception:
Thursday, May 16th,
from 6 – 8 PM
513 West 20th Street
New York, NY
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, Alabama; The Contemporary Museum,
Honolulu, Hawaii and The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C.
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| Image via jackshainman.com. |
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