TONY GRAY: 2008

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

The New Black is Black -Debs & Co, June 2002

Tony GrayThe New Black is Black June 20th - July 28th, 2002 opening reception: Thursday, June 20, 2002Debs & Co is pleased to present The New Black Is Black, an exhibition of installation, painting, and collage by Tony Gray. This will be Mr. Gray's first full New York solo exhibition.Mr. Gray uses found objects as templates on and from which to draw (literally) a synthesized critique of American history. In his series of Fairy and Mermaid paintings, Mr. Gray melds the forms and meanings of "fairy," presenting haunting panels where seemingly carefree and benign sprites reign in Black Barbie foxiness and rococco detail. Simultaneously belying and reinforcing their girly gravity, the somber figure of a tree and the abstracted children's-book-about-the-Freedom-Train figures in the background speak of the dreadful realness and varieties of Strange Fruit. In a similar vein, the Mermen and Maids drift sexily through the ocean deep, their hybrid nature both a signal of meanings and merely a fact of formal history. Simultaneously delicious and terrifying, the Merpeople are happy idealizations of transformation, subliming the horror of the Middle Passage with the promise of Yemaya's underwater realm.The Log Cabin is a found doll house emptied of contents, sitting on a hope chest surrounded by plastic bowls and plates. The desolate cabin (Mr. Lincoln's?, the maple syrup company's? the anonymous freed slave's? the cropper's?) has been taken over for a hideout by a group of Mr. Gray's black panthers. Drawn in marker on the cabin walls, the panthers are two dimensional cartoons, daydreams, and pipedreams: glamourously dangerous and desirable dissidents who have intruded upon domestic "bliss" and brought the political into the private. Of course, the political is ever present in the private, and Mr. Gray examines the subtle and not-so-subtle ways this presence is acknowledged and ignored. In his series of wallpaper collages, Mr. Gray uses this eminently functionless and tasteful domestic background as the setting for such exercises as the numbering of black figures in relation to white in depictions of middle class activities. The number is, not surprisingly, fairly consistent. The unequal equivalence of black and white, the notion of an illusory decorum established along economic, but not racial, cultural, or religious lines, and the willingness for most concerned to play by the rules of this free-market convenience, are as legalistic and hypocritical as colonial formulas regarding degree of blackness. Mr. Gray's wallpaper calculations require of the viewer an evaluation of personal complicity in regards to class and race identification. Mr. Gray was included in The Magic City at Brent Sikkema Gallery, in a two-person exhibition with Kara Walker at Byron Cohen Gallery in Kansas City, and most recently in the four-person exhibition Simmer at Echo Park Projects, curated by Ciara Ennis. He had a project room exhibition at DFN Gallery in 1998, a two-person exhibition at PS 122 in 1997, and a solo exhibition at Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center in 1999.

It's A Dream World-Or Is It? bell hooks, August 2000, Interview Magazine

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Tony Gray - artist's works in "The Magic City" group exhibition at Brent Sikkema, New York City - Brief Article
Interview, August, 2000 by Bell Hooks

IT'S A DREAM WORLD--OR IS IT?
Scientists who study the way we dream share the news that in our dream life we often construct identities that reproduce what is familiar and comfortable even as this known reality becomes part of a vision that is strange and otherworldly. If our first language is not English, even if we speak English all the time, in our dream life we return to the language of our origins. It is a primal thing. That sense of the immediacy of the primal is ever-present in artist Tony Gray's work, on view through August 18 in "The Magic City," a group exhibition at Brent Sikkema in New York City, where he conjures up visions that rely on the ethereal to disrupt any fixed notions of what we may think black identity is. In the space of the imaginary, blackness is as fluid a category as any other, even as it is grounded in a concrete history.

Gray's work takes that concrete history, the fact of blackness, of oppression, evoked by his Panther pieces, and mixes the past and present. But nothing is quite as it seems. This is most evident in the mixed medium images of the Black Fairy. Of uncertain gender but bearing all the signs of traditional notions of the feminine, the fairies in Gray's work challenge the stereotypes which always imply that blackness cannot be the site of fragility and vulnerability.
His Black Fairy blends notions of good and evil, daring us to move beyond simplistic concepts of black identity, of a dark unconscious world constructed as harsh and brutal, to one where there is innocence and opaqueness. In this imaginary world Gray resurrects a primal paradise where blackness is the site of a seduction that is elusive, tender, and fluid. But this does not mean he forgoes creating art that rigorously questions our notions of race and gender. Gray's work interrogates by subtly seducing. And as Jean Baudrillard reminds us: "Seduction always seeks to overturn and exorcize a power." This is the elusive presence of the seductress hinted at in Gray's work, the mythic play underlying all carefully constructed visions of history, reality, and identity.
bell hooks is the author of All About Love: New Visions and the forthcoming Salvation: Black People and Love, both published by William Morrow. Tony Gray's Black Fairy (1998), colored pencil, acrylic, collage.
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