Clarion Vol. 3: Nora Turato: govern me harder
Nora Turato, Word Processor
Excerpt:
Not every artist keeps her subject in reserve, but Nora Turato works with words and hoards them, too. For her solo presentation at 52 Walker 1, Turato pulled out choice bits of text she has had parceled away for years in her artefactual repertoire. Arranged in rapid succession across the gallery walls, as though they belong together, Turato’s words acquired a dramatic temperament that belies their stochastic ordering.
In her wall-mounted enamel pieces and mural installations, as in her live spoken word performances, Turato collapses dialogue into monologue. She does so without articulating, in the process, a singular “I.” Watching and listening to Turato perform hardly outlines the contours of her character’s specific, individual persona—that is, she does not trade in poetic applications of figurative language. Her rejection of lyricism and individual subjectivity across the media of her artistic practice is necessarily connected; Turato does not model artistic creativity as some kind of inward turning.
