KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is proud to present Dana Robinson’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, titled "Happy As A Lark". On view October 12 to November 13, 2023 with a collectors reception on Thursday, October 12th and artist reception Friday October 13th from 5-8pm at 561 Grand Street NYC. 

Focusing on three series in the artist’s oeuvre, the show revolves around replicas of models in Ebony magazines from the 1950s to 1980s. Illustrating the optimum standards of existence for Black people in those post-war decades, the artist laughs at the absurdity of these visions of an ideal life that pushed Black people to live by Western expectations that were never intended for nonwhite people. At the same time, Robinson is dazzled by the way the models executed their looks, their apparent ease and confidence. Their elegance mirrors the people she looks up to. Her paintings question the logic and the thinking of the time and highlight the opacity of that reasoning.

While the subject matter of Black models is from the same source, Robinson uses a different painting support for each series that is familiar to viewers—wood panels, silks, and canvases. For her wood panels, Robinson recreates the model’s likeness from the magazine by applying an over-abundant amount of acrylic onto plastic. Working quickly, she presses the plastic onto the panel, lifting it from the surface to provide the transferred image. The technique makes the final result imprecise, imprinting distorted faces and small streaks left on the paint surface. For both the silks and canvases, the artist wets both fabric materials to produce an absorbent surface for the colorful inks to diffuse. Introducing chance to an otherwise predictable feature–the face, Robinson leaves her paints to dry independent from her control. This gesture intentionally leads to the visual opacity and illegibility of these faces.

In Miss Pope is Miss Saint Augustine's College (2023), Robinson obscures much of the beauty queen’s face in the black paint of her hair. With her eye barely visible and the heavy white crown and blue velvet cape weighing her shoulders down, Miss Pope seems to still extrude levity with her bright white smile. Even the pastel orange background offers an escapist lightheartedness that lacks indications of a period or context. In an almost satirical rendering of a Black woman in this timeless void, the young miss is perpetually frozen in a state of imagined joy. Robinson buries this winner in the trappings of the pageant win and the colors of a deceptive happy place.

The illegibility of the true emotional states of Robinson’s models suggests a push for self-reflection. Recognizing the need for respectability politics for Black people to have at least a feeling of safety, the artist demonstrates with the thick and at times blotchy paint that this desire to align with white cis hetero patriarchal values is a goal that was never quite possible. Always arriving but never quite making it. Readers of Ebony were shown what might help them achieve a certain middle class status. However, no matter how one presented themselves, their skin color still dictated the treatment they received in a society that continues to ignore and erase Black history. The multimedia artist asks: Why continue to play a game you were never meant to win? Why not make up your own game? By recreating the images of these Black people that have been lost to time and apathy, Robinson forces viewers to see them, recognize them, and remember them anew.

This show is titled after the song ‘Have You Seen Her’ by The Chi-Lites. I like to think there's a little bit of "Her" in all of us, and we're not going back.

About the Artist: Dana Robinson has exhibited at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Texas State University, Fuller Rosen Gallery, 92nd Street Y, Spellerberg Projects, A.I.R. Gallery, Haul Gallery, and Regular Normal. Robinson was a contributing artist for the New York Times Magazine and The Baffler, and her work had been written about in Artsy, It’s Nice That, and Ain't Bad magazine to name a few. She was a fellow at A.I.R Gallery, a Vision Fund resident at ISCP and has shown work at Turley Gallery in Hudson, New York and The Bureau of General Services- Queer Division, in New York City. She has recently finished a public art work for ArtBridge in Bushwick, New York.

Artist Statement: Using painting, collage, printmaking, and fabric I address the topics of youth, femme identity, ownership, nostalgia through combining, reproducing and blurring vintage Black media. My visual language uses primarily 70’s Ebony magazines as a source material. I select stylized advertisements or editorial images that highlight the idea of upward mobility and a growing black middle class. This pop media leaves little room for deviation away from a cis hetero patriarchal middle class lifestyle. This is the life we are meant to aspire to but consistently fail to achieve to perfection due to not wanting to or it being out of reach. While being pushed and pulled towards this goal of a “perfect” I address the ways we deviate from this norm and find ourselves. Employing a language of humor and relaxation, I open up spaces of laughter and irony, while retaining an empathetic quality.

As these images are separated from their origins or recreated, their definitions change. The images are pared down to almost unrecognizable images that dissolve into flashes of skin and color, making an atmosphere that gently circulates and never quite settles. In the banality of the content is the intensely personal that reveals without giving everything away.

Exhibition Catalogue Press Release Price List Art Works On View    Video on YouTube