June 3–July 24, 2021
Artists: Cow Mash, Victoria Nunley, Natalie Terenzini, Zandile Tshabalala
Collective Nostalgia is a group show of women artists born in the ’90s.
The idea was born at the end of October 2020 after a series of Skype calls with different artists. The shared feeling was a nostalgic attachment to the past, nostalgia for the present and towards the future. We came up with an idea of community or even better of a feminine collective. And by then, it was clear to me whom to invite to the show at VIN VIN gallery and the process I was going to initiate. I involved two artists and then proposed each of them to invite one artist.
The first artist to invite was introduced to me by Rebecca Ness. Rebecca suggested me to look at the work of Victoria Nunley (b. 1991, lives and works in New Jersey, USA). Nunley is a figurative painter just like Rebecca Ness. It’s the only way she can paint when looking at things like her childhood toys recently found in her parents’ house. She didn’t enjoy playing with toys, but she would rather stare at them and reflect on the way they look. What we find in Nunley’s paintings is girlhood declined in every aspect. Nunley’s universe is constellated by her everyday objects such as sneakers, cheap beer bottles and cowboy’s hats. Nunley invited Natalie Terenzini (b. 1994 lives and works in New York). Terenzini spans from traditional portrait to mysterious representation of the female body and its surroundings, reminding a lot the so-called “Chicago Imagists.” A thoughtful combination of colour and texture gives to her paintings a tactile sensation that triggers off an increased desire to see more and, when possible, to touch.
Looking up in the dictionary, Natalie recalls that the nearest word to nostalgia is regret. That being said, an atmosphere of soft sadness arises and drives us to believe that this emotion is more complex than we thought, it’s unreliable and multifaceted.
Documenting our present times, I couldn’t ignore what is now happening in South Africa with women artists born in the ’90s. Zandile Tshabalala (b. 1999 lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa) stands out for the bold glamorous gaze her paintings transfer to the viewer. The female body is depicted in all its great blackness alongside a wild sumptuous nature. In her paintings she thinks of Nostalgia as a dialogue with her former self.
Naked black women covered in fur with giant palm leaves in their hands look at you and express the artist’s desire to being looked at and to being appreciative of the black colour.
A strong statement that carries us to the artist invited by Zandile: Cow Mash (b. 1994, lives and works in Pretoria, South Africa). She talks about her artistic practice starting from her self-given name: Cow. In her sculptural works, the female body is deconstructed merged with the cow to analyse the parallels of women and cows. The connection with the rural vs suburb is presented through the use of specific materials and again with the cow. For her Nostalgia is linked to a happy sadness. With this in mind, everything in her universe becomes more magic injecting, in her works a strong sense of collective spirituality linked to the collective gathering of spiritual spaces. At the end of the discussion with all the artists, another parallel word to nostalgia came up: hope. Where do we look for Hope? Terenzini said that she wants to portray casual people being together. This very simple desire resonated in my head and gave me a possible idea of where to find Hope.
Text by Sveva D‘Antonio.
