Dana Robinson: The Urgency of Leisure

“Using painting, collage, printmaking, and fabric I address the topics of youth, femme identity, ownership, nostalgia through combining, reproducing, and blurring vintage Black media. My visual language uses primarily 70s 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 to or it 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 find ourselves. Employing a language of humor and relaxation, I open up spaces of laughter and irony, while retaining an empathetic quality. 

As these images are separated from their origins and recreated, their definitions change. The images are pared down to almost unrecognizable images that 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.

In this series, as the magazine images are translated into paint, and the paint is smeared, pressed, and textured, the human beings at the center of these manipulated images become at once more abstract and exponentially more present. My process oscillates between casual experimentation, and wanting strict control over this unruly monoprint process, I ultimately discover I am not interested in finding perfection and choose to maintain a sense of curiosity about the results.” — Dana Robinson

Dana Robinson 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. Her work extends beyond gallery walls, as she's lent her talent to publications like the New York Times Magazine and The Baffler, and public art work for ArtBridge in Bushwick, New York. Her work has also been written about in Artsy, It’s Nice That, and Ain't Bad magazine to name a few. 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 and Kates-Ferri Projects in New York City. Later this summer she will also be participating in a group show Infinite Scroll with Ivester Contemporary in Austin, Texas. 

For more info please contact Will Hutnick: will@wassaicproject.org