Bio
Primarily identified as a painter, Norton's practice to date includes a range of materials and technology. Her work is informed by a robust intrigue with color theory, a love of geometry, and an endless curiosity concerning structures of perception and the nature thereof. Rebecca Norton is an artist, curator, and educator. She received her BFA from the University of Louisville in 2004 and her MFA from the Art Center College of Design in 2010. Norton's work is included in permanent collections at 21C Hotel Louisville, the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, and the Kentucky Museum at Western Kentucky University. She is the recipient of awards and grants from the Puffin Foundation, 2011, See.me 2013 Painting Category Winner, 2014, M.A. Hadley Fellowship, 2016, the Kentucky Foundation for Women Artist Enrichment Grant, 2019, and the Great Meadows Artist Professional Development Grant, 2019 & 2020. Norton has been a contributing writer for Arts in Bushwick and Abstract Critical. Her lectures and writings have been published on MOCA tv, the Brooklyn Rail, Duke University Scalar publications, and Blacksun Lit. Rebecca currently serves on the Board of Josephine Sculpture Park and is co-founder and program director of MaybeIt'sFate, a member-owned cooperative cultivating an artistic center and cultural hub in Louisville through a public art exhibition space and a member-based, salon-like social club.
Statement
My aesthetic infuses the hard-edge play of Op art with complex figure/ground relations. Think Bridget Riley painting Giacomo Balla's leashed dog's feet as the starting point for an idea about painting. That kind of fluidity of movement in a speculative time-space often serves as a conceptual foundation for my studies.
A significant development in my work can be said to begin in late 2009. In the affine series, 2009 - 2010, geometric figures defined by affine equations entered into my studies of color and light. Their aesthetic appeal cuts across my canvases, coloring movements, and depths within a visual field that distributes, up to a limit, several vanishing points in a plane. Like cubism, I was aiming to depict a multitude of viewpoints at once. The perspectival shifts captured in these works are intensified by the flow of gradients coloring the vector mappings.
In my earliest affine paintings, movement, directed through colored matrixes, was imagined to extend the projected space of affine geometry beyond the visible and into the physical space of the painting shared with the viewer. It was not an idea of mathematics as absolute, a priori, space that I was thinking about. Rather, it is the act of creating mathematics out of the lived experience, ie as a body, that I seek as a takeaway from my work. Spatial cognition, as something arising from sensation and memory, is as reliant on feedback from a gesturing body as it is from the mind. If you ask me, the former just might be the most basic ground for constructing our geometric intuitions.
Approaching painting as a place for “body” and “subject,” rather than a figure in the field, led me to develop a case for capturing "feeling" in a work of art. This idea has evolved into my current wish to establish a visual vocabulary of sensual bodies. As for the subject, the idea nowadays cannot necessarily be said to refer to a singular entity, but rather a conglomerate of entangled subjectivities. This in theory makes it difficult to ascribe the idea of "multiple perspectives" to a work of art when it is in fact made from a solo point of view. I have over the years expanded my practice to address the concern. In collaboration, as with works made with Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (Awkward x 2), the purpose of working together has been the emergence of a new "subject - more than the two of us together and not reducible to either person."
In "Rolling Uphill in Neutral" (2021), an identification with the perceptual as a combination of apparatus, affect, and a subjunctive action of desire laid the groundwork for an experiential study of an ephemeral event. I approach the phenomena of an object or landscape or, in works from 2021, the phenomena of experiencing illusion in a landscape to call attention to the problem of perception - that if we consider the possibility of illusory/hallucinatory experience in perception then we must acknowledge that we are never directly present with ordinary objects. This presents even further grounds for responding artistically to a "feeling" of an object or landscape, rather than attempting an accurate depiction of it.
In my most recent series of paintings, I investigated elements of climactic structure to highlight their complexities. The visual analogies and illusionistic techniques at work in "Climactic" (2023) acknowledge the intricate interplay between cognitive and sensory experience. Informed by naturalistic studies, the paintings portray a sensual vision, concerned with follies of perceptual tricks and pleasurable landscapes. Climactic serves as a thought-provoking exploration of how our perceptions are shaped, influenced, and evolved.
My practice is diverse, but I do not shy from a painter’s way of enrobing and disrobing the world. The illustrious problematics of perception are like candy for a device that we call painting, and for me, that is too fantastic a notion to reject. I often use them to fool the eye. Doing so, in a way, calls attention to the very act of seeing, and all that goes with it.