ART-PRESENTATION: Devan Shimoyama-Cry Baby
Devan Shimoyama’s paintings are armed with a dazzle of materials including glitter, rhinestones and impasto paint, with forms emerging and reforming from contour lines and silhouettes. His figures exist as magical and mythical beings that illustrate a story of masculine yearning, self-exploration and sexual desire through his own re-imagined, queer, black, male body.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Andy Warhol Museum Archive
Spanning his entire career Devan Shimoyama’s first solo Museum exhibition “Cry, Baby” includes painting, photography and sculpture, and a series of new works that are on view for the first time. Central to Shimoyama’s practice is the body, specifically the experiences and constructions of the queer, black, male body. Shimoyama merges this with narratives of mythology and fantastical allegories, exploring social constructions of queer culture and identity politics through the lens of magic and fantasy. Shimoyama’s previous body of work utilized self-portraiture as a means to study and depict the queer, black male experience. His own body became a surrogate vessel unto which these narratives and investigations were projected. His figure, nude and abstracted, exists within an unidentifiable other-world. His eyes are obscured by flowers or large-cut out collaged eyes, his body painted in gradations of color or splattered with abstracted florals. Often his form is intertwined with snakes, wrapping around his arms and torso as a symbiotic addition, or slithering around him across the expanse of infinite space like supporting figures in this unknown universe. In these works, Shimoyama’s material choices also become subjects themselves. Rhinestones, glitter, and sequins embody a physical representation of magic, while simultaneously allowing light and dimension to play through the works. In his recent “Barbershop” paintings, Shimoyama transforms the hyper-masculine social space into queer fantasy where feminine glamour and fashion take over, and tender depictions of boys don floral capes and glitter-encrusted hair. Shimoyama creates two distinct worlds: one an enchanted paradise, the other a queer imagining of the African American barbershop. The artist presents the barbershop as a space where young men and boys can feel shamed and vulnerable. In sculpture, he creates objects of mourning for Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice, both examples of the aggressive targeting of African American youth as fearful or threatening. While canvases feel joyful and celebratory, they also present commentary on pain and sorrow. Teardrops lurk in the background of his landscapes or stream down the faces of his figures as a reminder of the racial injustices at work in contemporary society. The exhibition makes a unique connection to The Andy Warhol Museum’s Permanent Collection and brings to light contemporary insight into one of Warhol’s largest and yet most overlooked painting commissions, the “Ladies and Gentlemen” series of 1974 -75. Visitors will find Shimoyama’s work in dialog with Warhol’s portraits of drag queens on the 4th floor of the museum’s permanent collection.
Info: Curator: Jessica Beck, Andy Warhol Museum, 117 Sandusky Street, Pittsburgh, Duration: 13/10/18-17/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, Fri 19:00-22:00, www.warhol.org
