INTERIOR DIALOGUE
June 12, 2021 - August 14, 2021

Long Gallery Harlem in collaboration with Project for Empty Space is pleased to announce INTERIOR DIALOGUE, a solo exhibition of tondo works by PES 2020 Artist In Residence Ron Norsworthy. The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday, June 12th, from 2 - 5pm. It will be on view through August 14th by appointment. 

INTERIOR DIALOGUE is an exhibition about social perspectives through the lens of the artist's personal life experience.  The works are engaged in the active centering of the artists' intersectional identities through the critical lens of decoration and ornament. This work explores how aesthetics often buttress systems of appropriation, oppression, and erasure. Norsworthy asserts that aesthetics are often used as a vehicle to justify the commodification of cultures and, by proxy, communities.

The exhibition is couched within a created environment that interrogates ‘Whiteness.’ The white-box space is defined by Norsworthy’s latest wallpaper work, Blackity (2021), and a series of objects that traverse function, decoration, and art object. The exhibition is held together with six tondos, each depicting an antique European vessel. Images of these ceramic artifacts were sourced from online and estate auctions. The vases are centered in the round space, and each sit atop a surface situated against a highly decorative backdrop.  Although the vases appear to be depictions of beauty and decoration, they function on another level as symbolic representations of the artist. 

The three planes in each tondo (the vase, the surface, and the background) conceptually evoke ways of understanding foregrounding identity within larger conversations of intersectionality. The hierarchy of these planes, vis-a-vis weight and importance, shift between the six tondos; with each acting as a different visual strategy that describes the interplay of object and background. The objecthood of the central object holds power, but is also at the whim of the space within which it is placed. 

For Norsworthy, the process of creating these circular works was an exercise in identity-centered space-making, an idea that pivots the idea of ‘ownership’ from other to self. The titles of the works speak to this contemplation:  The parenthetical titles, Lot #1, Lot #2, etc. play with the idea of commodification, creating a double entendre of the contemporary auction market while also evoking the violent history of the ‘auction block’ and the repercussions from Antebellum America that still reverberate today. 

INTERIOR DIALOGUE  is the sibling of Tell A Lie About Me. I’ll Tell the Truth About You, a second body of Norsworthy’s work created during his residency at Project for Empty Space. The two exhibitions are visually linked through an interactive rooftop mural and the Blackity (2021) wallpaper, which live at Project for Empty Space. The mural is a large-scale version of Norsworthy’s tondos at Long Gallery Harlem. 

Tell A Lie About Me. I’ll Tell The Truth About You. will be on view at Project for Empty Space through August 2021 at 800 Broad St. in Newark, New Jersey.