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Cedar Lorca Nordbye: To Frame, To Construct, To Occupy

04/05/14 – 05/25/14
8:00 am – 5:00 pm


Crosstown Arts Galleries
1350 Concourse Ave., Suite 280
Memphis, TN 38104 United States

Cedar Lorca Nordbye
 Utilizing the approximate quantity of wood used to frame a small house, the installation explores questions of diaspora, exile and relocation, with occupancy as a form of resistance, and construction as a metaphor for idea formation.The colorful and fragmented imagery of houses, figures and abstract designs cast on a variety of standard, wooden framing surfaces is the first phase of a two-part project. At the close of the exhibition, the graphically altered lumber will be donated to Memphis Habitat for Humanity and available for use in a newly constructed home, briefly visible as a collaborative artwork between the artist and the volunteer builders before being enclosed within the walls of a future dwelling.

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.

Cedar Lorca Nordbye

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