Coda by Norm Paris
APRIL 27 - JUNE 2, 2023
Opening Reception Saturday, Apr 27, 5-8 PM
Transmitter is pleased to present Coda, a solo exhibition by artist Norm Paris. By re-examining the vestiges of his youth, Paris explores masculine iconography through the lens of old media and cultural references. Vintage record covers, deflated sports balls, and baseball card collections are investigated via intensive processes of drawing, casting, and painting, resulting in images and objects that both conceal and reveal their origins. Set against the backdrop of his adolescence, Paris’s reference to fossilization is metaphorical and reflects a cultural and personal dormancy that suggests a calcification of memory.
These works burrow into the foundations of fandom and personal history, using analog media formats as the bedrock material. Collectibles, once vessels of youthful fixation, undergo a transformation that strips them of their original context and imbues them with new, layered meanings. Drawings become fossil-like imprints of a prehistoric crustacean, abstractions of once-living things. A basketball, deflated and hardened over time, is cut apart like a geode to reveal a center reminiscent of something at once mineral-rich and cavity-like. The athletic figure on a sports card is slimmed down until only a biometric armature remains.
Each piece in the exhibition serves as a visual analog for geological formation, ruins, or unfinished monuments—spaces where the past is both visible and obscured, known and unknowable. Through the source images and their subsequent transformations, Paris questions the processes of valorization, criticism, and forgetting that shape his personal consciousness.
Coda is more than a nostalgic recount; it is an inquiry into the slippery dynamics of memory through the lens of artifacts that are both mass-cultural and hyper-personal. Paris challenges us to consider how communal activities of reverence and fandom are often intensely private hermetic engagements that evolve and dissipate over the years.
About the artist:
Norm Paris is a New York-based artist, curator, and educator. He has had solo exhibitions at The Proposition in NYC and Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York in Brooklyn and has been featured in exhibitions at Ortega y Gasset in Brooklyn, Monya Rowe Gallery in NYC, Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, SCOTTY in Berlin, The Rochester Contemporary Art Center in Rochester NY, and The Print Center in Philadelphia, among other venues. Paris has participated in museum exhibitions at The Jewish Museum in New York, The Museum of Drawings in Laholm, Sweden, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC. He was a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts. Norm was a resident at the I-Park Foundation in East Haddam, CT in 2022, was a 2015-16 fellow at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, and has taken part in the Triangle Artist Workshop in Brooklyn and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. Norm’s work is part of numerous collections including The Jewish Museum in New York and the West Collection in Oaks, PA. He is a founding member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York. Norm Paris is a Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design and has previously taught at the Yale School of Art. He received his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and his M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art.
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