ANNO DOMINI Gallery

Exhibition: Navin June Norling, b. 1970. ANNO DOMINI Gallery celebrates the recent work of Navin June Norling (b. 1970), which examines Americana imagery culled from the debris of popular culture sales and folklore. Norling was raised in California, and starting from a young age, he spent summers on his grandfather's ranch in California's Central Valley. The ranch was a place where no resource was wasted, and everything was reused. His experience in this rural background influenced his use of salvaged parts and his eventual inclusion of bricolage and assemblage approaches in his formation as an artist. Norling later spent most of his childhood in southern California, where he began writing graffiti monikers. He and his friends used wheat-paste messages to make up geography, attempting to create a distinct aesthetic. The artist is now based in Seattle, and although he no longer physically affixes his moniker to public places, he has continued to be committed to the urban grit. His art is a palette of the street (ANNO DOMINI Gallery, n.d.). Norling's ongoing investigation into the dynamic American culture landscape and its sociopolitical complexities was greatly affected by his use of urban rubbish and trash. He uses cast-off wood in his work to build visual layers and texture (ANNO DOMINI Gallery, n.d.). This is evident in the windows in Good to the Last Drop (2005), which he showed at the Sculpture Center, New York, and Black Cats (2003) from the Brooklyn Museum's modern art collection (ANNO DOMINI Gallery, n.d.).

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