Through mixed media sculptures, installations, large scale drawings, and print-based media, Nyeema Morgan‘s interdisciplinary art practice critically examines dominant cultural narratives and their ways of empowering and marginalizing identities. Her work draws upon seemingly benign cultural artifacts such as recipes, popular jokes, canonical art works, books and fables to question how such kinds of material have become the tools of knowledge and culture building. Morgan deploys non-identical repetition and juxtaposition to prompt reflection on the mechanics of representation and its political and social underpinnings. Through formal strategies her work troubles the relationship between image, object, and text (language and vision) and calls into question how language mediates experience, as well as how such mediation can be represented visually.
Image: Nyeema Morgan, Soft Power, Hard Margins (installation view), 2021. Mixed paper media, cast resin, plexiglass, composite gold foil, and LEDs. Image courtesy of the artist and table (Chicago, IL). Photo credit: Robert Chase Heishman.