On view in the Crosstown Arts gallery, across the street from the Sears Crosstown building, which is soon to be the largest building remodel in the history of Memphis, the installation utilizes wood collected from multiple sources (including the interior of Sears Crosstown) to examine our sense of the structures we inhabit in a post 9/11, post-Katrina America.
“Our ideas, the thoughts that give shape to our days, our emotions and our interactions, are like the beautiful golden streaked Douglass fir two-by-fours that frame our homes. Humble, cut to length and hidden away.”
Cedar Lorca Nordbye is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Memphis where he has taught since 2003. His work has been exhibited in California, Atlanta, Chicago, Quebec, Skopje, Alabama, Kentucky and North Carolina in a variety of gallery, museum and alternative spaces. Norbye has carried out social-practice/performance artworks in Las Vegas, Paris, Greensboro, Seattle, Nashville and New York City, where he has been banned from the Empire State Building since 2003.
When asked where he is from, Nordbye replies, “Michigan for four years, Minnesota for one year, Iowa for four years, Massachusetts for five years, California for ten years, and before that in a childhood blur of hippie-Jewish-exiled wandering which spanned Connecticut, Guatemala, New Mexico and West Virginia, with my mother and my father…who actually is a Jewish carpenter.”
His work can be viewed online at cedarnordbye.com.
The exhibition was organized by the artist and Crosstown Arts.
