Navin June Norling

Lives and works in Atlanta, GA, USA

Artist statement

"I create work that is made from remnants of lives once lived and the people who have gone before me." Navin Norling In his ongoing practice, Navin Norling (b. 1970) examines classic Americana imagery and assembles miscellanea out of popular culture signifiers, sayings, folklore, and materialism. During his upbringing, Norling would spend summers on his grandfather's farm in California's Central Valley, where all resources were reused without any waste. The impact of that rural setting led him to embrace salvaged components and eventually integrate assemblage and bricolage techniques into his formal training as a painter. But apart from those summers, Norling grew up in suburban California and spent his youth in wild exploration across the Bay Area; part of a generation committed to establishing a personal aesthetic framework, whether in the use of graffiti monikers or wheat paste messaging. He has been vicariously loyal to that urban grit and has maintained a street palette in his work. The use of found objects and urban detritus plays a large part in his continued investigation of a dynamic American cultural landscape and its sociopolitical nuances. Cast-off wood frequently makes an appearance in the artist’s work, like the window panes in Good to the Last Drop (2005) presented at SculptureCenter in New York and in Black Cats (2003), held in the contemporary art collection of the Brooklyn Museum. In 1995, he received a BFA in illustration from the California College of...

Artwork