Nate Young The Transcendence of Time
Nate Young
The Transcendence of Time April 16 - June 27, 2020
Essay by Nyeema Morgan and Mike Cloud Edited by Staci Boris Photographed by Robert Chase Heishman
This catalogue was published on the occasion of Nate Young’s fourth solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery
©2020
“I’m interested in interjecting the portraiture canon with Brown and Black bodies, as well as gender fluid and queer bodies, to complicate hetero-normative perceptions of racial and queer identity and highlight intersectional identities not often discussed or represented in history and society.” - David Antonio Cruz
Introduction
m o n iq uem elo c he presents The T r a n s ce n de n ce o f T i m e, t h e ga l l e r y ’ s f ou rth s o lo exh ib ition w i th c onc eptu al a r t i st N a t e Yo u n g. T h ro u gh t h i s n e w b od y of w o r k , Yo un g mi nes hi s own fami l y a rch i v e s t o e x pl o re a n d qu e s t i o n t h e natu re of id e n tif icat ion , hi story , and the si g n i fi ca n ce o f r i t u a l a s a m e a n s t o i n s t i l l a u thority . T h e Tran scen d e nc e of Ti me al l ow s fo r a de e pe r i n v e st i ga t i o n i n t o e x ca v a te d b one s t h o ugh t t o b e from the horse that o n ce ca r r i e d t h e a r t i st ’ s gre a t - gr a n dfa the r f rom t h e S outh to the North du ri ng the G re a t M i gr a t i o n , a pe r so n a l n a r r a t i v e i llu m ina te d b y t he lar ger hi story of US rac e rela t i o n s a n d t h e m o v e m e n t o f bl a ck bo di e s . I n this co n t in uum o f work, You ng now c on s i de r s t h e i m pe t u s o f t h e bo n e s t h ro u g h the le ns o f s c ien ce an d phi l osophy, expl or i n g t h e i r a bi l i t y t o o f fe r cl u e s a n d i n s i g hts to his f a m i ly’s un iq ue jou r ney to i denti ty, wh i l e a l so co n n e ct i n g t o a m o re u n i v e r sa l narra tive . R iv e ted b y t he i l l u si on of ti me, Yo u n g e v o k e s t h e t h e o re t i ca l pro po si tion of a ca usal lo o p – the c onc ept of o bj e ct s a n d i n fo r m a t i o n a s s e l f- e x i s t i n g , throu g h a cyclical re l ati onshi p between ca u se - a n d- e f fe ct t h a t fu n ct i o n s t o p re s e rve a f ixed o utcome. Whi l e the w o r k s a re v i su a l l y ro o t e d i n n a r r a t i v e s of f a m ily h is t ory, t h ere i s a su btl e reference t o t i m e a s e x i s t i n g be yo n d pe rce i ve d lim its . “ T h e p ast , p resent, and fu tu re exi s t wi t h i n t h e wo r k , ch a l l e n gi n g a n d t r a ns c e nd ing lin e ar b o un d ari es by exami ni ng the co m pl i ca t e d re l a t i o n s h i p be t we e n the b one s a n d th eir o rigi ns, su g gesti ng thei r co n t i n u e d e x i st e n ce a cro ss m u l t i p le p lane s o f t i m e. Th ere i s a metaphysi c al pro o f o f i n fo r m a t i o n a l l o o ps t h a t su g g e s ts the p o t en tial to unl oc k and ac tu al i ze t h e pa s t a n d t h e fu t u re , t h ro u gh t h e as s u re d k n o w led ge of the bone’ s exi sten ce wi t h i n t h e h e re a n d n o w.” – N a te You ng M o re sim p ly pu t, You ng c onsi ders t h e i de a o f a n o bj e ct br i n gi n g a bo ut its ow n e x i s t en ce, a c onc ept popu l ari ze d i n m a i n st re a m m e di a t h ro u gh fi l m s s u c h as “ B a ck t o th e F u tu re” and “ I nterstel l a r ”, a s we l l a s we l l a s t h e re ce n t N e t fl i x se r ie s “D a rk” . T h e exh ib it ion presents tw o u ni q u e bo di e s o f scu l pt u r a l wo r k s , e a ch roote d in t h i s f ascin at ion wi th qu antu m ent a n gl e m e n t , wh e re t h e pre s e n t a ct u aliz e s a nd d i s c ov ers art ifac ts of the past. I n spi re d by r i t u a l s ’ a bi l i t y t o fr a m e , d e f ine , a n d em p ower, You ng presents rel i qu a r i e s t h a t l o o s e l y m i m i cs o r n a t e a lta rs a nd v it r i n es f oun d i n a hou se of worshi p, t h e re by e l e v a t i n g t h e h o r se bo n e s t o a s a c re d p o s ition o f authori ty and c u l tu ral re l e v a n ce .
Ex ce r pt s o f t e x t a ppe a r within e a c h
a lt a r,
his
reco un ti ng
d e pression .
the
harrowi ng
st o r i e s
of
gre a t - gr a n dfa t h e r ’ s
ba ttle
w ith
The bones bu i l t i nto e a ch wo r k t h e m s e l v e s re v e a l se cre tly c od e d
m e s sages wit h i n. Wh a t we arrive at i s an expansio n o f t h e o n go i n g cr i t i ca l i n v e st i ga t i o n of the m y r iad ways in whi c h meani ng i s co n s t r u ct e d, a n d h o w i t ’ s i n fo r m e d n o t only b y e m pirical ev id e nc e, bu t al so by ri tu a l a n d ph i l o so ph i ca l be l i e f.
Essay
Essay by Nyeema Morgan and Mike Cloud June 2020 The quiet incantations of Nate Young’s works— sensual and ethereal graphite drawings and skillfully crafted wood sculptures resembling humble furniture— take on profound significance during our current global pandemic and nationwide civil unrest. To be in the presence of, and to think about, Young’s work while overwhelmed by the relentless bombast of American political rhetoric is to be suspended in time and space where contemporary life and history are folded on themselves, where the body and the spirit are distinguished yet interdependent and occasionally at odds. This momentary suspension feels necessary. How long can we endure, and be complicit in, oppression and systemic inequities? The history of American capitalist ideology, rooted in white supremacy, espouses prosperity and liberty by divine right— a political idea rather than a religious one evoked as a foundation of inalienable rights for “free men”, the idealized citizen, the autonomous being at the center of all social, economic and political life, masters of their own unbridled destiny. “If you have never been deprived of your liberty, as I was, you cannot realize the power of that hope of freedom, which was to me indeed, an anchor to the soul both sure and steadfast.” - Henry “Box” Brown, 1849, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown. The objectification of people relegates them to a taxonomy of objects. As such, objectified “others” are pushed from the empathetic center of human subjectivity and are understood as being devoid of free will to lord political power. Through this oppressive logic, the objectified others’ participation in the world is merely driven by a force that occupies them. In cultural folklore, objects (or sculptures) are possessed—occupied through enchantment by a particular spirit. In various identity mythologies, this spirit may be characterized as deceit, greed, hate or lust for example. The objects serve as bodily vessels for what was known in Ancient Egypt as ‘Ba’, so that the spirit may interact with the world of other things—totems, sacred relics, Frosty the Snowman, golem, Ouija boards, the Amityville House. Within the identity mythology of the other is the mysticism of female seductive enchantment, the “magical Negro”, indigenous people’s intuited communion with nature and so on. Identity, as an archetype, is separate from the objectified living beings that labor beneath it.
Detail from The grandfather paradox, 2020
The mythologies at the center of Young’s work are both aesthetic and material, related to the artist’s own parentage, faith and legacy. His uncanny, rarified objects, liturgical in appearance, are reminiscent of reliquaries, tables and altars, and are situated between craft tradition and the esotericism of sculptural art objects. A number of provoking references can be gleaned from Young’s works, including Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, metaphysical paradoxes implied by the possibilities of time travel and the subject of fugitivity. Representative
of the latter is the
extraordinary story of Henry “Box” Brown, who in 1849 escaped slavery by shipping himself north in a self-carpentered wooden crate (Brown later became a professional stage magician). Brown’s vessel of escape and the peril of his journey also share a metaphoric relationship to the Judaic
“sukkah”,
a
temporary
shelter
originally
constructed
by
the
Israelites
as
they
fled from their Egyptian masters. Paradoxically, the modern evocation of sukkahs are joyous symbols of human frailty and dependence on providence. When dispossessed European Jews immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century, they found new possibilities for cultural mobility and status. Placing a piano in the sukkah during the holy week of Sukkot was one way of expressing that newfound hope and faith in possession and accomplishment. Identity, being a purely subjective possession, often functions for the faithful as a transcendence beyond material possessions. But by the same token, the sacred heirloom (aged, battered, and repaired as a material body in its own right) can accomplish a transcendence of its own beyond identity and spirit. While the Hebrew teacher taught the maintenance of a static identity, the piano teacher taught cultural mobility, garnering higher esteem than the Hebrew teacher.
Young’s ruminations on mobility and his paternal lineage, characterized by depictions of Black masculinity, places the sukkah within the heirloom, so to speak. It locates frailty at the heart of his apparently stolid constructions, functioning as an armor that contains both a corpse (a horse/ male ancestor bone) and a ghost (the holographic reflection of that bone). Like a tiny sukkah carefully placed within an exquisitely crafted Steinway, Young’s recent work radically short-circuits the relationships between frailty, stolidity and inheritance, through the aesthetics of the heirloom and the archetypal narrative of Black masculinity, dispossessed of everything except his spirit and his flesh. The character in Young’s narrative is one of his very own ancestors, his greatgrandfather— a horseman, an unrewarded genius, an unpitied fugitive and an unrepentant philanderer. Young limits his sensual depictions of his horseman/ancestor to often half-visible handwritten texts. He denies us the familiar and welcome aesthetic charge of Black male flesh and fills the cavity that denial creates with a pastoral aesthetic (in the liturgical rather than natural sense). The mundane, liberatory, handwritten text, dark, somber wood finish, bespoke, slightly idiosyncratic dimensions and relentlessly erect specificity of sculptural form place three distinct spirits in a fruitful counter suspension. The first of these spirits is the radical political spirit of Black masculinity represented by the narrative of his ancestor/genius in his oppression, flight and philandery. The second is the spirit of the artist’s own expressive inner life as the creator of the work and its meaning. The last is the spirit of our communal God and his/her/its call to submission through craft, stability and decorum. That final spiritual call is the subtext in this text-heavy work. The work’s sophisticated aesthetics, through stolid craftsmanship and monkish minimalism, conjure Black pastorship as a foil to the rakish horseman. Both the pastor and the horseman are, after all, possessed by a spirit: the social spirit of religious discipline and the political spirit of racial survival. Great works of art seem to transcend being merely the personal work of a particular individual and become culture works in which many different individuals find themselves represented in different many his
ways.
spirits
delicate
Young
that
submits
haunt
touch,
deft
our
to,
embraces
shared
associations
and
political, and
otherwise
social
muscular
and
reconciles
economic
craftsmanship,
himself
moment. Young’s
to
the
Through poetically
resonant work constitutes a profound contemporary text that folds itself through the contradictions of time, space and identity that we all find ourselves laboring beneath.
Detail from Underneath, 2020
Virtual exhibition walkthrough available at https://vimeo.com/411004867
Installation views
Artworks
A Hill, 2020 White oak, horse bone, spray enamel on tinted acrylic, LED 23 1/2 x 9 3/4 x 5 1/4 in. (59.7 x 24.8 x 13.3 cm)
“Memory has begun its abandon and what has filled the vacuum of its absence Sanity may be a measure of ones ability to manage the lowest and the heighest (sic) point Once in the bell jar for an exit becomes less visiblethe only escape seeming to be one of permenant (sic) conclusion�
A Stone, 2020 white oak, horse bone, spray enamel on tinted acrylic, LED 23 1/2 x 9 3/4 x 5 1/4 in. (59.7 x 24.8 x 13.3 cm)
“The thought of losing my identity for a second time in my life is too daunting to bear. I fell as if burdened with heaviness like the great weight of a stone. The marker for me that indicated my loss of self has been this decay of mind.�
Underneath, 2020 white oak, horse bones, spray enamel on tinted acrylic, LED 23 1/2 x 9 3/4 x 4 1/4 in. (59.7 x 24.8 x 10.8 cm)
“What have I given and what has been taken? Within my visual field while from me hidden. How long could my life go on this way for some time what seems obscure or underneath the cloud of a dark depression What is it that makes a man desire tomorrow?
A Horse, 2020 white oak, horse bone, spray enamel on tinted acrylic, LED 23 1/2 x 9 3/4 x 4 1/4 in. (59.7 x 24.8 x 10.8 cm)
“My mind is fading while I do feel as though my body still has strength. A horse drawing a cart who’s wheels aren’t round as they should be.”
a. b. c. d.
a causal loop is a theoretical proposition whose either through recausality or time travel, a sequence of events is among the cause of another event. this event in turn becomes the cause of the aforementioned event. These causally looped events exist in spacetime but have an indefinite determination. An example would be a billiard ball striking its past self by emerging in an alteration in its trajectory toward a time machine the past ball enters the time machine and emerges again striking itself and moves that ball into a time machine
Causal Loop, 2020 graphite on paper and acetate, oak artist-made frame 31 x 23 x 2 in. (78.7 x 58.4 x 5.1 cm)
a. b. c.
a paradox through which inconsistencies appear through the changing of the past during time travel. an object from the past emerging to cause future events to happen in anachronistic order. the suspension of the fluidity of past events only possible in their present state.
The grandfather paradox, 2020 graphite on paper and acetate, oak artist-made frame 31 x 23 x 2 in. (78.7 x 58.4 x 5.1 cm)
a. b. c.
the theoretical proposition of time travel opens up multiple potentials for paradoxical events i.e. a causal loop wherein an existent is self-propagating. multiple universe theory wherein the changing of past events creates an interdimensional rift
Theoretical proposition of time, 2020 graphite on paper and acetate, oak artist-made frame 31 x 23 x 2 in. (78.7 x 58.4 x 5.1 cm)
Untitled (vitrine 1), 2020 walnut, horse bone, felt, tinted acrylic, LED, motion sensor with audio 35 1/4 x 27 x 13 1/2 in. (89.5 x 68.6 x 34.3 cm)
Untitled (vitrine 2), 2020 walnut, horse bone, felt, tinted acrylic, LED, motion sensor with audio 35 1/4 x 27 1/4 x 13 1/2 in. (89.5 x 69.2 x 34.3 cm)
Untitled (vitrine 3), 2020 walnut, horse bone, felt, tinted acrylic, LED, motion sensor with audio 24 1/2 x 49 1/2 x 49 1/2 in. (62.2 x 125.7 x 125.7 cm)
Sepulcher, 2019 Walnut, horse bone, plexiglass, gold leaf, spray paint, LED 28 x 16 x 8 in. (71.1 x 40.6 x 20.3 cm)
Biographies
Nate Young (American b. 1981, lives Chicago) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009 and a BA from Northwestern College in Minnesota in 2004. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. Young’s recent solo exhibitions include (re)collection), The De Pree Art Center at Hope College, Holland, MI (2020; …WELL!, Julius Caesar, Chicago (2019); Cleromancy, moniquemeloche, Chicago (2017); re:collection, VisArts, Richmond, VA (2017), Stations, Luce Gallery, Turin, Italy (2016), The Unseen Evidence of Things Substantiated, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA(2015), and But not yet: in the spirit of linguistics, moniquemeloche, Chicago (2015). His work has been included in many group exhibitions, including FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018); Four Saints in Three Acts, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, (2017); Chicago Invites Chicago, Galerie Lelong, New York (2016); Retreat, curated by Theaster Gates, Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago (2014); Tony Lewis and Nate Young, Room East, New York (2014); the Soap Factory’s Minnesota Biennial (2013); Fore, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012); and Go Tell It on the Mountain, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Young was a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, and he is the recipient of the Knight Arts Challenge Fellowship from the Knight Foundation (2014); the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2014); and the Bush Fellowship for Visual Artists (2010). His work is in notable collections, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; Mott Warsh Collection, Flint, MI; and the Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia. Young was recently commissioned by the Driehaus Museum (Chicago, IL) to create new works and site specific installations which respond directly to the complex history of the museum’s 1883 building and its architecture. The exhibition will be on view in the Summer of 2020. Young is co-founder and Director of the artist-run exhibition space The Bindery Projects, in Minneapolis. He is Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Nyeema Morgan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. Morgan earned an MFA from the California College of the Arts and a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art. Solo and two person exhibitions include Marlborough Contemporary, NYC, NY; Bolder Museum of Contemporary Art, Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Portland, ME and Art in General, NYC, NY.
Group exhibitions
include The Drawing Center, NYC, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NYC, NY; CSS Bard Gallery, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Galerie Jean Roche Dard, Paris, France and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME. Morgan’s awards and residencies include the Skowhegan School of Painting
and
Sculpture,
Program,
Shandanken
the
Projects
at
Lower Storm
Manhattan King
Art
Cultural
Center,
a
Council Joan
Workspace
Mitchell
Painters
and Sculptors grant and an Art Matters Foundation grant. Mike Cloud is an American painter who earned an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art and a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois-Chicago. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at P.S.1, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; the American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY; Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovak Republic; Honor Fraser Gallery, CA; Thomas Erben Gallery, NY; Good Children Gallery, LA; Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; White Columns, NY; Max Protetch, NY; the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL and Apexart, NYC. Cloud’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Art Review and featured in the publication Painting Abstraction by Bob Nickas, published by Phaidon Press. His work is held in private and public collections including The Bronx Museum, NY; Lincoln Center, NY and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Cloud has lectured extensively on his work and contemporary theoretical art issues at the Jewish Museum, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Yale University, Cooper Union, Bard College, Kansas City Art Institute and the University of New Orleans.
Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622 For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com