Ronald Young
Black Jack, Missouri
I create mixed media sculptures from recycled objects from my immediate environment which I deconstruct and reassemble into mixed media power sculptures.
MessageRonald Young is an artist and educator whose studio practice centers on creating mixed-media assemblages from recycled objects gathered from his immediate environment – aged doors, old tools, wood molding trim, rusty chains, ropes and chains – are among the objects he repurposes into sculptures he calls "Power Objects". These Power Objects are based on the spiritual belief that all objects in nature have a soul. Through the materials Ron incorporates the African diasporic traditions of masks, sculpture, ancestry figures and Nkisi n Kondi.
Statement
My current studio practice involves recycling found objects from my
immediate environment. I collect bricks, old and decayed decorative
architectural features, broken tools and rusty metals which I deconstruct
and reassemble into mixed media sculpture. There are multiple levels of
meanings to be derived from my harvesting of objects reflecting the
diasporic traditions of spirituality carried to America by West Africans as a
result of the transatlantic slave trade. It is a blend of practices from the
people of the Congo/Benin/Togo and Nigeria. I use assemblage to
recontextualize materials into power objects by combining the African
traditions of ancestry figures, mask, sculpture, and Nkisi nKondi.
My work is about the intersection of ideas and materials, visually
represented through juxtaposition of objects to invoke meaning which are
both lyrical and visceral. The works are intentionally ambiguous and, just
like the society they come from, full of contradictions. Embedded in the
narrative of my assemblages are concepts of making connections
between the past and the present, America and Africa, and the physical
and the spiritual world. The works embody the collective consciousness of
generations of African Americans rooted in aesthetic traditions of Sankofa:
the African concept of understanding one’s past in order to go forward.
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