Tameka Jenean Norris: Home, Black America and Trap Music
An exclusive Q&A with the multi-faceted artist ahead of the opening of Cut From The Same Cloth at Ronchini Gallery, London.
Tameka Jenean Norris is an artist that has strived for the pursuit. The pursuit of belonging, meaning and inspiration. Hopping between LA, Berlin and New Orleans it seems that she’s arrived full-circle, now, home is within herself and her creative spark comes from the orchestra of crickets and frogs in Iowa.
A native of America’s Deep South, identity is the fibre of Norris’ art to date and Cut From The Same Cloth, her upcoming exhibition, is an artistic reference to her venture into exploring self-image. Through an array of media, including performance, video, installation, photography and painting, Norris uses her own personal experiences and memories to translate this to the audience.
We caught up with Norris before the opening of Cut From The Same Cloth at London’s Ronchini Gallery on 25 November.
What will viewers expect to see in Cut From The Same Cloth?
‘This past summer I spent over a month at the MacDowell Colony Artist Residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in the woods and in isolation, decompressing and thinking about my life. I began a body of work; a series of paintings.
Upon my arrival to the Grant Wood Colony in Iowa City, IA, this past August, I continued developing my work which now consists of 8 portraits of men that are small works on paper, 5 large portraits of women on found fabrics with embroidered text and 4 more abstract, fabric and text based paintings. I hope these works further push the narrative regarding the geographical, experiential, and emotional distance between the maker, the subject in the portrait and the audience. They are all members of my family! The reference images come from
the internet; news sites or Facebook. There are also multi-sensory installation elements that I plan to explore in the exhibition as well.
Was it important to hold the exhibition in London? If so, why?
‘Yes! I think it’s important to my process and practice. I have always negotiated the idea of proximity into my work. During Hurricane Katrina, I was living in Los Angeles and was in school making paintings of shotgun homes and homes from my childhood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that were destroyed. In 2012, after graduate school at Yale, I moved to New Orleans into the same type of shotgun house I previously depicted in my Post Katrina works.
My initial site visit to Ronchini Gallery in London in 2013 was my first time traveling to the UK. I was overwhelmed with visits to Christie’s in Mayfair and the streets of Brixton. The trip allowed me to experience (in person) the rich, enduring and heroic vastness of the many Black Diaspora cultures.
My 2014 show ‘Almost Acquaintances’ allowed me to reunite with my step dad’s Aunt Sybil, who lived with us in Mississippi off and on for a few years when I was a kid. Aunt Sybil’s British accent was flavoured with a Jamaican rhythm. She was also the first black person I ever met with a British accent or Jamaican accent.’
In the upcoming exhibition, you have sourced images from social media. How is social media an indicator of artistic youth culture? Is it a healthy form of expression?
Within this exhibition I am thinking more about how people (who were born before the invention of the internet or had limited access to internet) engage with social media and technology. I am more interested in how social media bridges lives between generations of family and families that live far apart. How many of us have grandparents or aunts on Facebook? Parents or 2nd or 3rd cousins on Instagram?
It’s often intense, frustrating, clumsy and sometimes just perfect the way the multiple communities I belong to (on social media) interact with one another. Groups ranging in age, geography, social status, race, artists, non-artists, academics, non-academics and groups I previously engaged in like my high school Facebook friends or the entire staff of the now defunct Mom and Pop internet/ laundromat I once worked at 10 years ago.’
You're currently living between New Orleans, LA and Berlin. How do you credit these cities for their influence on your work? What city inspires you the most?
From 2012-2015, I was living closer to my biological family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast between New Orleans and Gulfport, Mississippi. I was attempting to negotiate and rekindle relationships with community and family that had not been nurtured for about 15 years.
This past year and a half, I was living between Los Angeles and Berlin. Currently, I live in Iowa City, Iowa, where I’m a Visiting Assistant Professor and Grant Wood Fellow. Recently I articulated for myself that home as a geographical location does not exist anymore for me. Home is only within this shell of a body I have and it’s
also temporary. At different times in my life I’ve had to accept that exactly where I was, was home.
Right now, inspiration comes from being in a city that is easy to navigate and manage. When I was most recently in Los Angeles, in Inglewood, my senses were constantly heightened, it took its toll. Where I live now, at night, I hear hundreds of crickets and frogs!
Your 4 track EP, Ivy League Ratchet, was created as an anthem to "tear shit up". How important is aggression and the ability to provoke when using creativity as an outlet in lower socio-economic backgrounds?
Rap and trap music have been an influence on this conceptual EP music project. I think oppressed people in general have always used song and protest as a way to be heard in times of injustice, even when it seems there is no end in sight. I am more interested in creating a safe space for white fragility to identify itself. I don't
think it's necessary for aggression or provocation to be present for privileged people and white men to be uncomfortable. I don’t believe anyone should feel unsafe, but I completely advocate discomfort. I expect that when I’m performing, my (white) audience (even if just for the 16 minute performance) feel like they want to crawl out of their skin while also being completely seduced by my brown/black/queer/female/petite/big-tittied body.
What is your opinion of black identity in America right now?
My heart is more broken than I have an opinion about black identity in America. Black men are being killed by police at an extremely high rate. Black and low income communities are being gentrified and being pushed out to the edges at an extremely high rate. Black culture is being stolen, borrowed, appropriated and served back to us. Young black girls (in America and Africa) are being harassed, suspended or even kicked out of school for wearing their natural hair to school.
SAM NARR
Tameka Jenean Norris: Cut From the Same Cloth runs until 21 January 2017 at Ronchini Gallery, London.
ronchinigallery.com
