NADA Miami

 

 

Leroy Johnson, August Krogan-Roley, and Narcissister

a mixed collage sculpture of a house
12/05/2023 - 12/09/2023

At NADA Miami 2023 Margot Samel presents a thematic group exhibition with Narcissister, Leroy Johnson, and August Krogan-Roley around notions of home. What constitutes the conception of a specific place? Is it the light that falls off buildings from afternoon sun? The layers of history collaged over surface and plane? Or is it in subverting what home is prescribed to be? Working against an outmoded colonial notion that “home” is an object of ownership, the artists in this presentation know belonging as a feeling and as a memory– a connection to another ancestral time, and genealogy of constructions that arrive them at the present.

The work of late Philadelphia artist Leroy Johnson has ‘place’ physically embedded in its form. Everything was fair material substrate in his creation process, incorporating discarded materials such as cardboard and scraps of metal found throughout his home city, and even Earth itself dug up and used as clay from various locations around his urban spaces. He was deeply aligned with a tradition of African American artists who theorize the lasting effects of a violent break from their homeland. Johnson visualizes where home is found in the aftermath of slavery and subsequent racial oppression in the sutures of ongoing social infrastructures that both build and collapse communities like his own. In Narcissister’s Femme Maison collage works, home is put into a descriptive critique as a typology of symbols analogous with ‘home’ come into contact with various parts of the female body. Following Johnson’s infrastructural musings, a mise en scéne of our constructed worlds is laid, the utopic images of mid-century furniture and marketing adverts for an idyllic home life are leveled through the juxtaposition of physiological play to reveal their narrow-targeted audiences– Narcissister’s works ask: home for who? And at what cost? August Krogan-Roley’s paintings are of common spaces left within the formations of home, away from the spectacle Narcissister describes and critiques. Backyards are cast with afternoon sunlight and riddled with the detritus of children’s toys or intimate quotidian gatherings. These works remark on the extraordinary pleasure of nothing-in-particular, the safety gathered within feeling at home, and the unique pleasure in the world’s most common moments produce when one feels tethered to them. 

Of home, Joan Didion wrote in the 1970s in her book, South and West, “Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right”, to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places.” The presentation at NADA Miami pairs three practices together across painting, sculpture, and collage to take up Didion’s ease through searching for visual articulations of “the ring of real places”. Pushing against the conception that home is a set of things to accomplish, each artist in the presentation suggests that home is found in space and time combined, in quiet moments where the past and future are felt at once, and in the contact between subject-hood and a greater context of belonging.