Art Hound

After taking a long hiatus, Buy Some Damn Art is back! Today we have a new show by Najee Wilson, an artist, designer, model, musician and personal friend. We met years ago working in the same wallpaper studio and hit it off from day one. Najee is one of the nicest souls you will ever meet and somehow finds ways to be creative and contemplative in every aspect of his life. It is a real honor to be able to bring Najee’s mixed-media art out of his Brooklyn studio for the first time and in front of an (online) audience.  

The pieces I’m presenting find their inspirations in old world technique and craft such as marbling, fabric dying and kintsugi (the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with fine metals). Highly Viscous/Various Materials is a series of patch-worked objects and mixed-media fine art pieces that highlight decay and ephemerality. I wanted to show the beauty in imperfection and subtle variations in material and application. Each piece explores how beauty can be created by employing irregularity and free flowing chaos.

What do you hope comes across to online viewers?
That true beauty can exists in imperfection, the subtle otherness.

How did you end up working with such time-intensive, hands-on materials?
Growing up I loved working with my hands, really getting elbow deep into the creative process. These days I fill my spare time creating little tiny moments that I later string together in my art. I took to fabric manipulation, sewing, dying and distressing early on to add a unique look to the fabrics of my life. The patchwork leatherwork is inspired by the many quilts that my family matriarchs created. Those quilts featured found fabrics and were imperfectly pieced and sewn by hand with utilitarian mends in places. I loved that the years of use and mending became a part of their design aesthetic.  

Why is making art important to you?
It’s all about raw expression, for me the act of creation is like a meditation. I find tranquility in myself during my creative process.  

Your work flows in so many directions – music, modeling, design, art. how do you make time and space (and energy) for so many different things?

Every way in which I go about expressing myself brings me newfound strength and energy. Honestly, I just do what makes me happy. When I’m making art I am certainly not thinking about making art, my mind simply wanders. I feel that everything I do and have the pleasure of seeing inspires possible outcomes for my work. As a fine art muse, I’ve learned that the artist’s canvas is like the mirror that does not lie. Musing is a silent collaboration between artist and model where my presence, movement, proportion and gaze could inspire a masterpiece for said artist. This act, for me, is incredibly vulnerable and powerful, all in the same. To inspire, to be, to think, to do, to listen is what makes an artist. Every method of expression presents me with a new opportunity to learn something from myself all while sharing that perspective.

What’s next? or tell us about a fantasy project. 
I am currently in the process of writing and recording new music which I am excited about. I am preparing to release a new single add music video at the beginning of the New Year under the moniker Taupe Sounds. Sonically my music exists in a R&B space, but I am influenced by many genres. 

Marjorie Dial is an artist in Portland, Oregon who didn’t discover her passion for ceramics until she hit 40. “When I first touched clay at the age of 40, I felt like I woke up from life and started dreaming.” I find it very interesting to see the shapes of her ceramic vessels translated so fluidly to prints and drawings.

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“Dial’s practice is animated by the belief that we are all engaged in a deep search for meaning, connection, pleasure and purpose. Much of this seeking takes place hidden from awareness in submerged, unconscious spaces – an ocean of unsayable things that have been expelled from language… Her interests lie in giving form to – creating markers, often broken, dislocated, remnant – for what exists in shadowy places.” 

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Clare Celeste Börsch’s show The Mushroom Hunters is based on the poem by Neil Gaiman and is described by the artist as a “large-scale, floor to ceiling, immersive three-dimensional collage” which took six weeks to complete.

“The women, who did not need to run down prey, had brains that spotted landmarks and made paths between them left at the thorn bush and across the scree and look down in the bole of the half-fallen tree, because sometimes there are mushrooms. Before the flint club, or flint butcher’s tools, The first tool of all was a sling for the baby to keep our hands free and something to put the berries and the mushrooms in, the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and the crawlers.” – Neil Gaiman, excerpt from The Mushroom Hunters

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Another Börsch installation, Intimate Immensity:

Claire Colette is an LA-based artist whose show Mountains, Times, and Other Devices is currently running at Ochi Projects. 

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“Mountains, Time, and Other Devices is an investigation into darkness, light, time, and mysticism. A series of quiet, abstract landscapes consider concepts of interconnectedness relating to land, the cosmos, and the self… Inspired by pantheism and pagan culture’s relationship to the natural world, seasons and the solar system, Colette’s imagined universes feature suns and moons floating over mountain range silhouettes held within painted frames — suggesting a multitude of worlds, cosmos or a scene from another planet altogether.” – Ochi Projects

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This last pairing is from the show Binder of Women at Guerrero Gallery. 

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Photos courtesy of the artist, Ochi Projects and Guerrero Gallery.

Pace Taylor is an artist in Portland, Oregon.

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Jenny McGee Dougherty is an artist, curator and arts organizer based in Portland, Maine. Her work can be found on the online gallery Tappan Collective.

“I am interested in the intersection of humans and their environment, both natural and built. The repetitive use of public spaces and the marks that are made, both intentionally and unintentionally, over time become a living record of the movements and actions of individuals collectively inhabiting this space. Within our understanding of the allotment of space, we often overlook the places that we use the most, while also dismissing these spaces as utilitarian or banal. When graffiti gets covered up with several shades of a neutral color, a new image and a new meaning becomes part of our landscape. I am interested in how these places that belong to everyone get woven together and how they evolve as metaphor.”

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