About the Exhibition
Opening reception + performance Saturday, September 9, 4-7pm
This fall, moniquemeloche is proud to present the second solo exhibition by Nate Young, in which the artist continues to critically investigate structures of knowledge production, systems that inform belief and the illusiveness of meaning. Expanding on earlier personal explorations, Young mines his own family archives and oral history, folding multiple narratives together to explore and question the fluid nature of knowing and identifying. Text, drawing, woodcraft, sculpture, and performance are used to present images related to the history of black jockeys, the Great Migration, divining, and Young’s own mythologizing of his great-grandfather. The exhibition foregrounds the aesthetic and structural frameworks through which historical information is presented in order to cast simultaneous doubt and belief and question the nature of reality vs. illusion.
Nate Young (American b. 1981, lives Chicago, IL) 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, VisArts, Richmond, VA (2017), Stations, Luce Gallery, Turin (2016), The Unseen Evidence of Things Substantiated, Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (2015), and But not yet: in the spirit of linguistics, moniquemeloche, Chicago (2015). His work has been included in many group exhibitions, including 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); 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, Philadelphia, and he is the recipient of the Knight Arts Challenge Fellowship from the Knight Foundation (2014); the Bush Fellowship for Visual Artists (2010); and the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2014). His work is in notable collections, including the Walker Art Center and the Fabric Workshop Museum. Young is co- founder and director of the artist run exhibition space, The Bindery Projects, in Minneapolis. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.