Nora Normile
Setting

March 15th - April 16th, 2023

The question of “how?” - how often, or how much - we attempt to achieve a sense of self within, or despite of, our surroundings is at the center of Nora Normile’s Setting. What of our interiority is translated into our spaces? How much control do we have over what this reveals, and even with such exerted efforts, how much control do we really have over what people conceive these efforts to be representative of? The struggle of this awareness is translated through a deeply loving hand, into the hyper-realized detail and adornment of the many pieces of ceramics that come together to create the artist’s sophomore solo exhibition at Entrance.

Throughout Setting, Normile explores a specific type of ‘girly-ness’ through the personal lens of her own upbringing and her childhood bedroom. Across multiple mediums she employs various modes of adoration or worship, along with the idea of collecting as a learned behavior, to the context of domestic spaces and usable architectures. This physical exploration of a specific kind of femininity is seen in the careful drawings of ornate dowry chests, the finger marks in the stoneware sculptures, and the ceramics she adorns in elegant patterns, flowers and bows.

Normile’s meticulously fabricated works attempt to devise a whole - a whole work, a whole being, a whole show - out of the fertile dissonance that exists between the entropy of the physical world and the slipperiness of societies perceptions, value standards and definitions. Normile researches and ‘catalogues the marks of human intervention where the human is not physically present’ as evidence of the efforts we go through to arrange our surroundings to satisfy our specific tastes, and sometimes further, to disguise decay.

This excellent display of skill in ceramics arranges the history of Pattern and Decoration alongside some of the more ‘macho’ sculptural interventions, exploring the at once troubling and potent experience of personal expression, while fantasizing about domestic architectures, abstracting the craft-arts and crafting the fine arts.

Nora Normile (b. in New York, NY) received a BFA in Studio Art from NYU in 2015 and is receiving an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, where she currently teaches ceramic sculpture. This is her second show with Entrance, following Fruit-Call, her solo debut in 2019.

For a PDF or details please email louis@entrance.nyc