NYAB Event - Nathaniel Mary Quinn “Here He Come: Black Jesus”

Nathaniel Mary Quinn “Here He Come: Black Jesus”

Rawson Projects

This event has ended.

Rawson Projects presents Here He Come: Black Jesus, the gallery’s first show with Nathaniel Mary Quinn. The exhibition will include the artist’s first video works; new collages on paper; and one of the artist’s largest paintings to date, all conceived as part of a site specific installation.

Here He Come: Black Jesus is the third installment of A Process Series, four mini-exhibitions that invite each artist to transform the gallery space in order to present and explore the inspiration behind their most recent work.

An interview between the artist and the gallery follows:

Rawson Projects: When you were approached to participate in the exhibition what were your initial reactions?

Quinn: My initial reactions were fueled by nervousness; it was a proposal to participate in an exhibition that required an unusual level of personal exposure in ways I was not accustomed to practicing. I also knew that I would be forced, on some level, to produce work that was not a traditional part of my studio development; this thought was, perhaps, more fearful than the need for being uniquely vulnerable.

RP: What is the relationship of the exhibition to your larger body of work?

Q: The exhibition, “Here He Come: Black Jesus,” is partly predicated on the bedrock of the pain and loss, suffering and longing, and deliverance and redemption that operate as the internalized, psychological, and emotional mechanism behind the creation of my work. The exhibition, hopefully, will provide the spectator a lens through which they can view and experience the thoughts and memories that play a collective and pivotal role in my studio art practice: on some known and unknown level, the inextinguishable yearning to make the work that I create, with all of its explainable and inexplicable content, visual potency, and narrative weight.

Hence, the videos– “Simply Beautiful” and “When Sunday Comes: Memories”– provide many of the memories that continue to resonate with me in regards to my childhood experience and how such experiences constructed and deconstructed my identity as a human being. “Black Jesus” represents the impact of a specific culture upon the idea of the “Son of God;” my mother, an unwavering believer in Christ, prayed, with intense hope, for the safety of our family, most of which fell upon my body– I was the baby. From my perspective, Jesus was not the so-called compassionate and giving figure in the Westernized, traditional sense. He did not look like the images hanging in our apartment; he did not fit the description laid out by the roaring sermons of the preacher. Something more pressing was necessary to deliver us from the evils of our community: the gang violence, drug trafficking, murders, rapes, severe lack of resources, and poverty. Jesus, from my perspective, had to be born from the very entity that was designed to destroy us, much like a poison that was created to kill, yet, another poison. This was a hyper-masculine Jesus; He made the first move; He initiated verbal assaults to all challengers; His authority and wrath were exacted upon the heads of the wretched thugs who terrorized the residents of the projects. He was not governed by religious doctrine; He ruled by force and violence for the sake of my mother’s peace– for the sake of our family’s peace.

RP: Did you find the idea of having the freedom to show something that was “inspirational” or unrelated to your primary studio practice challenging?

Q: Being that my work is based on visions– visual ideas that appear, unwillingly, before me, to which I have a visceral response– I was overwhelmed by the challenge of having to create video works. However, altering the vision was futile. All other possibilities felt inauthentic and contrived. I cannot live with dishonesty in my work. Hence, the challenge of making the videos provided the sort of inspiration to which I am accustomed: releasing self-control, transcending, pushing my work. This is the means by which one becomes a great artist; not being afraid to fail is an unequivocal component of such a pursuit. Finally, after firmly embracing the challenge, I felt liberated; I was, once again, present, no longer trapped by the limitations of my mind. At last, I had returned to my seat: I have nothing to lose; everything dear to me had already been lost; all that remains is this moment.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn (b. 1977), has had recent solo exhibitions at Pace London, Bunker 259 organized by William Villalongo, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), and Rush Arts Gallery. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Artists Space, The Bronx Museum of the Arts and Susan Inglett Gallery. Quinn received his MFA from New York University in 2002 and is the recipient of the Lorraine Hansberry Artistic, Performance, and Fine Arts Award and a two-time winner of the National Arts Club Prize. He lives and works in New York City.

Media

• Painting

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