The Palm-Wine Drinkard | Johannes Högbom, Alyssa Klauer, Heidi Norton

March 17 – April 16, 2022

“One of them asked us from where did we come?  I replied that we were coming from my town, then he said where.  I told him that it was very far away to this town and he asked again were the people in that town lives or deads?  I replied that the whole of us in that town had never died.  When he heard that from me, he told us to go back to my town where there were only alives living, he said that it was forbidden for alives to come to the Dead’s town.”

  — Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, 1952

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present The Palm-Wine Drinkard, featuring new works by Johannes Högbom, Alyssa Klauer, and Heidi Norton.  Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and photography, all three artists intersect in the space between different states of being or consciousness.  Through surreal compositions, they evoke the liminal realm between waking and dreaming, animate and inanimate, alive and dead.  The exhibition’s title is drawn from Nigerian author Amos Tutuola’s 1952 novella of the same name, which follows an unnamed, often intoxicated protagonist on a meandering and metaphorical path in pursuit of ever more palm-wine.

Never quite sober and never quite awake, the protagonist meets gods, spirits, natural forces, animals, and magical objects on the road.  He survives these encounters, including one with Death himself, through a combination of his cunning and his own magical powers, which allow him to control objects and change his shape.  At once human and supernatural, he moves nimbly between both worlds.

The Palm-Wine Drinkard was initially criticized in Western media as irrational and strange, as it cites mythical traditions that were unfamiliar to most English-language readers.  Today, however, the novella is celebrated for its nonlinear narrative and its complex allusions to Yoruba folklore, which it intertwines with contemporary references.  A similar process is enacted by the artists on view, all of whom produce work that channels the mythical or inhuman forces.

Johannes Högbom’s work cites the history of European oil painting; the works themselves evoke half-remembered dreamscapes.  Goats and swans, posed as if for portraits, possess strange intelligence, while still-lives are suffused with uncanny dread.  Heidi Norton’s sculptures and photographs highlight the agency and animacy inherit in plants and the natural world, a concept which is often occluded by Western understandings of nature.  Plants become beings that are capable of collaborating with the artist on her work, resulting in lyrical compositions.  Alyssa Klauer’s complex and phantasmagoric scenes feature faces and objects appear on the canvas as if surfacing from a some supernatural realm.  She draws together images from art history, current events, and personal narratives to produce an intense psychological space.

As in Tutuola’s text, the works transgress the boundaries of the real and the repressed.  As we navigate between them, they offer strange and novel ways of looking, allowing us to gaze both inward and outward at once.

Johannes Högbom (b. 1994, Dalarna, Sweden) is based in Trondheim, Norway.  He creates paintings rendered in an aesthetic reminiscent of 16th century European oil painting, portraying subjects that are drawn from varied sources - from life and personal memories, as well as dreams and more imaginary origins. His paintings are inhabited by mute objects and plants, animals, insects and people, creating a space in which multiple points of views collide and co-exist. Through fragmentary glimpses into different worlds and narratives, with subjects that seem to deny being bound to any particular time or place, the line between the past and the present, what's an illusion and what's not, emerge and intertwine.

Alyssa Klauer (b. 1995, New Orleans, LA) is a painter based between New Haven, Connecticut and Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017 and her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2019. Klauer has been awarded the 2021 TOY Foundation Fellowship alongside the 2021-2022 NXTHVN Studio Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Grin City Collective, Chautauqua School of Art, and NYU Steinhardt. Her work deals with themes of magic, transformation and dreams through the lens of queer adolescence.

Heidi Norton (b.  1977, West Virginia) is an artist and writer whose 1970’s upbringing as a child of New Age homesteaders in West Virginia resulted in a strong connection to the land, plant life and nature. She received her BFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was a recipient of a residency at Elmhurst Art Museum where her exhibition, Prismatic Nature, a major site responsive exhibition was on view. Other solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Monique Meloche Gallery Chicago, among others. Selective group exhibitions include Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, GRIMM NY, the Knitting Factory, Chicago Cultural Center, Ohio State University, Gallery 400 University of Illinois Chicago, La Box Gallery National School of Art France. Her writings and work are include in Art21, BOMB Magazine, Journal for Artistic Research, Grafts by Michael Marder, and newly released, Why Look at Plants ed. by Giovanni Aloi. She is now based in New York and an adjunct professor at FIT and International Center of Photography. Her most recent illustrated essay, The Faceless Plant: A Sketch for Timothy Morton, is in a recent issue of BOMB Magazine.  Norton will open a solo site specific exhibition at Wavehill, Bronx July 2022.

Press

artnet news | March 24, 2022

Artsy | April 5, 2022