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.