Lost and Found  

The Art of Ronald Young 

I scrounge the alleys, boarded-up buildings and vacant lots of the city like an archeologist searching for buried treasure. The ghosts of a once thriving community have a story to tell, before all memory of their existence is erased. A treasure-trove of materials left behind for me to collect that help tell the story of what we value in our disposable society: an abundance of wood, now burnt and rotten, that were once doors, window frames and decorative molding – wrought iron – rusty nuts, bolts and screws – old broken tools – ropes and chains – tons of bricks – and thousands of nails. These are the materials I use to explore the concept of the “Power Objects,” the spiritual belief that all objects in nature have a soul.  

I use assemblage to re-contextualize materials into mixed media sculptures by combining the African traditions of ancestry figures, masks, sculpture, and Nkisi Nkondi. Embedded within my mixed media sculptures are links between the past and the present, America and Africa, and the physical and spiritual worlds. These power objects reflect the diasporic traditions of spirituality carried to America by West Africans as a result of the transatlantic slave trade. It is a blend of practices from the people of the Congo/Benin/Togo and Nigeria. The works embody the collective consciousness of generations of Black people rooted in the aesthetic traditions of Sankofa, the African concept of understanding one’s past in order to go forward.