NAYLAND BLAKE Gorge, 1999, extrait vidéo Avec l'aimable autorisation de la Matthew Marks Gallery

Nayland Blake

Nayland Blake’s work, bringing together installation and performance, drawing, web art and video, has been described as provocative, tortured and even sinister and brutal, but also as tender and poetic. Blake explores issues around identity, sexual orientation, racism and the stereotypes that shape our sense of identity. He often works with food, for example in Feeder 2 (1998), his best-known work, a sort of log cabin made entirely out of gingerbread whose smell is released when adventurous visitors filch a few mouthfuls. For ORANGE 2012 we are presenting Gorge, a video of a 1999 performance during which the artist, naked to the waist, ingests phenomenal quantities of food offered to him by a black man, set to repetitive and alienating music. Nayland Blake is an artist with a hybrid identity, born to a black father and a white mother in 1960 in New York, where he lives and works. He studied at Bard College and the California Institute of the Arts, and regularly acts as a curator and critic. His work can be found in collections such as those of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art.