Dana Robinson
Using painting, collage, printmaking, and fabric I address the topics of youth, femme identity, ownership, and nostalgia through combining, reproducing and blurring vintage Black media. My visual language uses primarily 70’s Ebony magazines as a source material. I select stylized advertisements or editorial images that highlight the idea of upward mobility and a growing Black middle class. This pop media leaves little room for deviation away from a cis hetero patriarchal middle class lifestyle. This is the life we are meant to aspire to but consistently fail to achieve to perfection due to not wanting or being out of reach. While being pushed and pulled towards this goal of a “perfect”, I address the ways we deviate from this norm and therefore find ourselves. Employing a language of humor and relaxation, I open up spaces for laughter and irony, while maintaining an empathetic quality.
As these images are separated from their origins or recreated, their definitions change. The images pared down to almost unrecognizable dissolve into flashes of skin and color, making an atmosphere that gently circulates and never quite settles. In the banality of the content is the intensely personal that reveals without giving everything away.
Dana Robinson (b. 1990, Brooklyn, NY) has exhibited at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Texas State University, Fuller Rosen Gallery, 92nd Street Y, Spellerberg Projects, A.I.R. Gallery, Haul Gallery, and Regular Normal. Robinson was a contributing artist for the New York Times Magazine and The Baffler, and her work had been written about in Artsy, It’s Nice That, and Ain’t Bad Magazine. She was a fellow at A.I.R Gallery, a Vision Fund resident at ISCP and has shown work at Turley Gallery in Hudson, New York and The Bureau of General Services- Queer Division, in New York City. She has recently finished a public art work for ArtBridge in Bushwick, New York and a solo show and Kates-Ferri Projects in New York City. Robinson anticipates a group exhibition at Johansson Projects early 2024.
