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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