Joy Yamusangie - Feeling Good
Client
NOW Gallery
Services
Exhibition Design
Visitor Journey
Project Management
NOW Gallery on the Greenwich Peninsula announces the 2022 Young Artist Commission Feeling Good by Joy Yamusangie. The Young Artist Commission, now in its 4th year, is awarded to outstanding rising talents in the fields of visual arts and illustration.
Working closely with Joy, the exhibition design is a playful interpretation of the artist's paintings.
Yamusangie invites the viewer to interrogate constructs around identity and celebrate self-expression. The artist conjures up the stylish Feeling Good Jazz club, creating intimate and evocative spaces to inhabit NOW Gallery and immerse the viewer. An accompanying jazz score deliberately contextualises the exhibition's physical space, revealing deeply personal narratives.
Yamusangie's coveted works use textural materials to convey a sophisticated and multifarious style that features illustration, collage, painting, and sculptural interventions. Their work often features expressive mark-making and deliberate, flat, vivid blocks of colour to create figurative renderings.
This imaginary club became a vision for me, a space that symbolised gender euphoria and speaks specifically to my own experience with understanding and celebrating my trans identity and my journey with learning music. I was inspired by the main character in the book Trumpet by Jackie Kay which I later learnt was based on the real life story of musician Billy Tipton. Thinking of how music, specifically Jazz, allowed both the fictional character and the real musician Billy to find a home for themselves.
– Joy Yamusangie
