200.7 x 116.8 cm
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.
Nate Young, a narration between a true reliquary and a family itinerary
by Rossella Farinotti
A large bone protrudes out of a wooden sculpture. To approach this installation is to encounter something mystic and to observe a reliquary that Nate Young has created, together with its hand-drawn copy. We are dealing here with a diptych made for Cleromancy, Young’s second solo show at moniquemeloche: the bone of a horse, one that the artist himself dug up, sticks out from a walnut base that grows from the earth and is placed in dialogue with a pencil drawing of the bone itself, covered at the top by a gray cloud, to designate the part that is visible in the sculpture. A game with a clear aim. The artist has drawn what we do not really see. The part hidden in the earth is visible on the paper. And vice versa. What does this indicate? Why are we denied the reality of the whole? Young has given the observer a narrative based on real events, but portrayed with symbolic, mystic, personal and, I might say, even false elements. A contradiction based on an artistic reproduction that Young recreates through drawings, sculptures, installations, and a performance. And so a doubt is triggered.
The theme of doubles is an attractive one for artists. A double has often been developed through symbols and different meanings, and through them there emerges the idea of repetition, of a twin, a doppelganger, copy, or exchange. The idea of a relationship between two entities is also another fascinating theme. And a very philosophical one. Indeed, one need only consider Plato’s “cave” where the question of the existence of reality is acute, or of Didi-Huberman’s ideas about images. Young has undertaken new itineraries built on personal stories linked to his family and his studies; these are conceptual and pragmatic and indicate a tangible development of his art, both in its marks and its aesthetics, which are immediately recognizable but more immediate. Young upturns truth, and at times he reveals this, while at others he conceals it. Might this be the reproduction of a real object? Who is it that decides that the original and what was derived from it are not the same? Why is it that the copy, the one made by the artist with his pencil drawings or with his wooden sculptures – the two media most typical of Young’s practice – though not being original are always different? This is a unicum that sparks off everything.
Nate Young’s poetics often arise out of a personal story that he develops in different ways. It is enough to think of his past series “Diagrams with my father” where the artist takes up the theological teachings of his father, through a rereading based on language, and aesthetically reworks them with refined and detailed diagrams on paper and various kinds of wood with sophisticated incisions and inlays. This time what interests the artist is the story of his great- grandfather, from the southern United States who undertook a journey during the Great Migration. We don’t know where he came from. We don’t know what he was doing. He made a personal evolution that Young has testified to with a ring, exhibited by moniquemeloche at EXPO Chicago, given to him by his father. Or maybe Young found it. The handing down of a symbol, in the case of the ring, from generation to generation, is the inspiration for a new story that begins with the discovery of the horse’s bones. It is once again a narrative linked to the subject of migration, here entwined with the history of black jockeys, who were originally an integral part of American horse racing, but who were later excluded from official races, and forced to move from country to country. Migration, mysticism, Masonry, identity, predictions, and divining, memory and history.
Memories and histories are documented by the existence of the ring and the staging of the bone, as well as by the use of holograms. All new pieces that Young created for this new body of work. In other words, the themes revealed in this show are diverse and complex. It is up to Young to unravel them and to mediate between truth/fantasy/visual poetry, the visual poetry that prompts viewers to absorb complex stories and concepts through a clear language.
“...run, and see that your bones stay together, they're trying to escape, they don't want to stay with us”. – Hermann Hesse.
