Louis & Sam, 2016 , xerox prints. Courtesy the artist.
Louis & Sam (detail), 2016 , xerox prints. Courtesy the artist. Photo: QM Curatorial Staff.
Sam Vernon with vocalist Abby Dobson, When You’re Smiling...The Many Faces of the Mask, performance, May 22, 2016. Courtesy the artists. Photo: QM Curatorial Staff.
Inspired by the collage practice and improvisational genius of jazz legend and Corona resident Louis Armstrong, Louis & Sam is a site-responsive wall installation that draws on intergenerational exchange, historical memory, and the influences of artistic and personal ancestry. Vernon’s practice becomes intertwined with Armstrong’s work as a visual artist, which utilized the fronts and backs of reel-to-reel audio tape boxes as surfaces for his serial compositions of clippings, photographs, and ephemera. In Louis & Sam, Vernon advances this use of repetition in her own Xerox drawings and patterns, which are informed by Gothic and Afro-Deco motifs. Her multistep production process is derived from printmaking techniques, where images are hand-drawn, photocopied, transformed, and reproduced again many times, often abstracting the original drawing in an act of “ghosting.” To create this immersive environment, Vernon has developed a visual language that surfaces as a performance of collage-making, in particular the collage-making of black experience.
Performances:
When You’re Smiling...The Many Faces of the Mask with vocalist Abby Dobson
May 22nd, 2:30pm
July 31st, 2:30pm
Sam Vernon earned an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University, New Haven, CT (2015) and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2009). She has most recently exhibited with the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2015), Mandeville Gallery at Union College, Schenectady, NY (2015), Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY (2014), the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn, NY (2013), Ewing Gallery of Art & Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (2012), and the Emery Community Arts Center at the University of Maine, Farmington, ME (2012).