Anthony Gallery is pleased to present The Death and Untimes of Jackson and CASUAL T. Titled after a decade-long dialogue between Nate Young and Tony Lewis, “The Death…” brings together recent work by both Young and Lewis centered on their respective adolescent history, “the dreams of our ancestors”, and loss. Utilizing an overlapping vocabulary of materials and methods,Young and Lewis continue their conversation on conceptual art, drawing, theology of art, sculpture, and camaraderie. This exhibition marks the ten year anniversary of the artists’ first two-person exhibition together at Room East Gallery, New York in 2014.

Nate Young presents works initiated by his ruminations on his great-grandfather’s fugitive flight from the South during the early phase of the “Great Migration.” In a not-so-uncommon story of reimagining oneself his great-grandfather left under duress and was forced to invent an alternate identity. In his work, which spans sculpture, drawing, sound, installation and light, Young mines the space between his departure and arrival as a second middle passage of sorts. If the void of his subjectivity can be thought of as a space of potential Young hopes to find new ways of conjuring notions of being here.

Untime is a term borrowed from the theorist John Murillo III who proposes blackness’s endless proximity to death necessitates a new definition of time. He writes:
“If we understand Blackness as a structural position with a phenomenological relation to time’s force, then what happens when time is a component of the universe’s anti-Blackness is anti-Black itself.”

“Time loss. Time-lapse. Time loops. This is Black time: dead, undying and deathly time. Black time is deathly unethical in its essentiality to the deathly orders of violence to which it subjects Black folk. It is unquantifiable and infinity multiplied by a negative, and so wholly indeterminate, unknowable and unpredictable. In its deathliness to Black existence, it is an essential and unwanted but perhaps unavoidable companion to being Black, here and now, always and wherever… What we arrive at… is untime: a Black, unethical, deathly, unquantifiable, unknowable relation to time. Black life and death are untimely, subject to the singularly violent operations of time.

The fragments are everywhere, and they demand that they be handled with care.”

Extending Lewis’s ongoing investigation of the relationships between drawing, abstraction, and language, CASUAL T pushes the notion of collage to emphasize the blurred boundaries between art and writing, revealing words as objects laden with history. Building on the artist’s connection to Calvin and Hobbes—the influential and beloved comic strip by Bill Watterson about a boy and his stuffed tiger, which ran worldwide from 1985–95—CASUAL T operates as what Lewis describes as a “stepping stone” to poetry:

“I can’t believe how dull my life is. It’s so boring here. I know, I know from your faces that you share with me the feeling of compassion and the feeling of outrage that this kind of thing should have happened, what in fact are we going to do to this policeman and what in fact are we going to do to this barman? Shoot for the Moon! Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars. The American community has refused to do this. Nothing ever changes around here. Nothing ever happens. We’ve got to care that it happens, we’ve got to do what we can to change the warp and woof of moral thought in society in such a fashion as to try to make it happen less and less. Don’t waste time bathing in a negative experience. Spin your energy and focus you attention on moving on. What a perfect Day! Our ideals rather are some sort of a superficial coating which we come up with at any given moment in order to justify whatever commercial and anxious experiment we are engaged in. Wow! This is the future!”
– Tony Lewis

The artists have created two distinct collaborations for this exhibition: an 800 square foot, graphite on paper, 1:1 scale drawing of the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago by Lewis shoved into a walnut sculpture designed by Young, built specifically to hold the aforementioned large-scale drawing. As well as, a site-specific cocktail bar inspired by the convivial “third place” for artists to convene, argue, and discuss the deepest aspects of art and friendship. The bar is built by Nate Young, while the menu is created by Tony Lewis.

The Death and Untimes of Jackson and CASUAL T will be on view during public hours from October 6th to November 2nd, 2024.

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Tags: ANTHONY GALLERY, Chicago, Nate Young, near west side, The Death and Untimes of Jackson and CASUAL T, Tony Lewis