Tameka Norris: Almost Acquaintances

Ronchini Gallery presents Tameka Norris' first European solo exhibition in collaboration with ARTNESIA. Working across a wide range of media, including performance, video, photography, and installation, Norris' practice addresses issues of space and body. Norris lives and works in New Orleans. In new large-scale paintings, the artist continues her Post-Katrina series, which she began in 2009, depicting houses in Gulfport and Biloxi - Norris' childhood home - and shotgun houses in New Orleans. The works are built up mark by mark using oil paint on stretched bed-sheets in a colourful and impressionistic style. Norris began the series whilst living in Los Angeles as a student but travelled to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi to take photographs for use as reference material. Though she experianced Katrina from the safety of the UCLA campus, she used her family's personal circumstances as a point of departure for the work. Now that Norris has moved back to New Orleans and her studio and home is a shotgun house in the 9th Ward - an area famously devastated by Hurricane Katrina - her relationship to the site has changed. Her work investigates what is happening socially, physicallly and emotionally as the site undergoes gentrification. As the sity changes as buildings are torn down and reconstructed, Norris' previous references no longer exist, forcing Norris to draw on her memory, dreating a more autobiographical reflection. Tameka Norris received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, LA before graduating with her MFA from University School of Art in 2012. Her work can be seen in Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, from 14 November 2013 - 9 March 2014. Ronchini Gallery is a contemporary art gallery founded by Lorenzo Ronchini in 1992 in Umbria, Italy, which relocated to Mayfair, London in February 2012. The gallery aesthetic is defined by Minimalism, Spatialism, Conceptualism and Arte Povera and it retains an unblinking future-focus on progressive movements whilst remembering the past. Its exhibitions have explored pioneering movements across a broad spectrum of contemporary artistic practice. Working with acclaimed curators and scholars from across the world, the gallery provides a rigorous context in which its artists can be viewed. http://www.ronchinigallery.com