Johnson Lowe Gallery opened Dangerous Games, the second solo exhibition of works by Navin Norling, a California-born, Atlanta-based artist, on Friday night. Norling practices dissecting classic Americana imagery through found materials, folk traditions, and layered visual codes.
Johnson Lowe was founded in 1989 by Bill Lowe and re-established in 2023 under the direction of Donovan Johnson, who first walked through the gallery’s doors as an intern in 2012 at the age of 18. After Lowe’s passing in 2022, Johnson took the reins with a clear sense of purpose.
“I wanted there to be increased visibility for Black artists in the program,” Johnson said Friday. “I wanted there to be increased visibility for women in the program. I wanted there to be just increased diversity through and through.”
That vision found an early landmark in The Alchemists, Johnson’s debut exhibition as director, which placed Mark Bradford alongside emerging Atlanta artists and brought Ebony G. Patterson and Shanequa Gay into the same space. Dangerous Games continues that trajectory. Norling is an artist Johnson brought to the gallery himself, and the exhibition is a natural extension of what Johnson describes as a gallery committed not to trends, but to artists who, in his words, “stir up something within our souls.”
Norling has been based in Atlanta for seven years, recruited to the city by SCAD after years of showing in the Bay Area, New York, and across the country. He describes Atlanta the way he once described the Bay Area of his youth, a city alive with creative energy, music, art, and community. “It kind of brings me back to my 90s vibe of the bay, where everybody kind of was just doing creative things,” he said. “I feel like Atlanta is one of those kinds of cities.”
But Dangerous Games is not a celebration. The exhibition, three years in the making, is a stamp in time, with American history, with cultural erasure, and with the political moment Norling sees unfolding in real time.
“My work is always coming from an American lens,” he said. “What I have been feeling over the last few years is that they’re trying to erase our histories.”
The show takes its title from a 1960s French comic book, a phrase that initially caught the artist’s attention for its cinematic quality and grew heavier as the years passed. The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, and installation threaded through with the logic of quilting, panel compositions built from color blocks, and coded symbolism that draws on African American quilting traditions.
A central formal strategy is whitewashing: surfaces painted over, then scraped back, cut into, or partially removed. The gesture mirrors what Norling sees happening in American public discourse, the deliberate obscuring of Black and diasporic histories. Lace overlays and quilt-like panels further complicate visibility, softening the surface while concealing what lies beneath.
“What you have here is installation, paintings, sculpture,” Norling said, describing work that also references the upcoming semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the United States. Red, white, and blue thread through the exhibition not as a celebration but as a coded critique. Gumball machines dispense red pills, introducing chance and participation. Recurring figures, the Watcher, wrestlers, angry white men, children, cherubs, dragons, and amulets, accumulate meaning across works like a visual language in motion.
Among the most striking pieces is a throne that doubles as a performance work Norling first presented in New York in 2018 but never exhibited again, in part due to the pandemic. He chose this moment, this show, to bring it to Atlanta.
“It means something now in the relevance of that particular piece,” he said.
Norling describes his approach as “blue humor”, a gut punch and a hug, provocative but not without warmth. The trap in the work, he acknowledges, is the stereotype. The goal is to move past it.
The exhibition reflects what Johnson says is the gallery’s core ambition, not political alignment or trend-chasing, but expansion. Asked what he wants visitors to leave with, Johnson didn’t hesitate.
“An expanded view of the world,” he said. “Always. That’s just what it is. If you ever go to any art show and you don’t have an expanded view of the world, then why did you go?”
For Norling, the answer lives in the work itself, in the figures bound by chains that can’t be seen, and in the viewers willing to look closely enough to find them.
“I would hope that they can see past the idea that the figures in chains are a metaphor about the idea that we are still living in chains,” he said. “They’re just invisible.”
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