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Contemporary Talks
Past Event October 26, 2019 / 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Discrit
Wasting my Beautiful Mind: Understanding the Poetics of Black Fungibility
Talk
Discrit presents Wasting my Beautiful Mind: Understanding the Poetics of Black Fungibility by Yanique Norman, a lecture presentation examining artwork of all mediums including her own, followed by an open forum discussion.
In an effort to fully understand the profound complexities of blackness, artist Yanique Norman has developed a fantastical methodology that can both capture the peculiar constitution of black interiority as well as simultaneously treat racist iconography, an essential biological component of black DNA, like a deadly fungus. In tethering blackness to the fundamentals of mycology, the work aims to mimic an actual saprobe, symbiont, commensal, and zombie prototype. So then, Black Fungibility, is more than just a liberatory tool for one to dream more freely and boldly— but is a new philosophical program that finds power in not side-stepping a duplicitous history, but in a surreal and beautiful overpowering of it.
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Bios
Discrit
Discrit (“critical discourse” / “discourse critique”) is an initiative of public knowledge-sharing and discussion. Spanning lectures, seminar-style discussions, critiques, and screenings, Discrit provides the public with programming dedicated to explorations of contemporary art and culture and free, university-quality art education. Discrit is Joey Molina and Chris Fernald.
Joey Molina
Joey Molina is a multi-disciplinary artist and scholar working between video, installation, and collage. Their work engages with visual culture as material, object, and ephemera. Molina’s research interests include horror films, queer theory, and new media. They received their BA from Georgia State University in 2013 and will be on track for their MA in Film and Video at Georgia State University in Fall 2020.
Chris Fernald
Chris Fernald is an artist, writer, and cultural programmer. He is the Co-Founder of Discrit and a Graduate Student in the History of Art at Williams College. His work has been exhibited in group shows in New York and Mexico City, and his poetry and art criticism have seen publication in both Canada and the US. His writing and creative work often examine how modernity’s crises disassemble and re-constitute notions of personhood. Recurring subjects of interest include techno-spirituality, post-human cosmologies, lifestyle minimalism, animism, and the digital’s relation to the afterlife. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013.
Yanique Norman
Yanique Norman is a multimedia artist whose work primarily deals with privilege and nationalistic ideologies all the while pondering a decolonial future. In an ongoing series that predominately feature collage on paper, video and sculpture, Norman reworks official portraits of Presidential wives so as to allude to a troubled past. Work serves as a reclamation project by reimagining iconic images so as to both reflect and institute a fungible counter narrative regarding blackness. Currently based out of Atlanta, Norman is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 2018) and Georgia State University (BFA, 2014). Recent exhibitions include NADA House (New York); Sullivan Galleries (Chicago); Sandler Hudson Gallery (Atlanta); Hudgens Center for the Arts (Duluth); Mast (Atlanta); Illges Gallery at Columbus State University (Columbus); Gallery 72 (Atlanta); Zuckerman Museum of Art (Kennesaw); The Atlanta Contemporary and Museum of Contemporary art of Georgia. Her work is in the public collections of the High Museum; Hammonds House Museum and the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. In 2018, she was awarded the Susan Antinori Visual Artist Grant. In 2020, Norman will have her first solo museum exhibition at Albany Museum of Art.