February 2019 / Danny Giles

Danny Giles

Figura

Curator / Emily Zimmerman

February 07 – March 02, 2019
Reception / Thursday, February 07, 6–8pm

For his solo exhibition at SOIL, Chicago-based artist, Danny Giles, presents a set of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional abstract portraits that explore the representation of the Black figure as a construct built through collective projections and which finds form through the picturing of public figures in both mass media and visual subcultures. In this suite of new works, Giles reappropriates the likeness of Barack Obama from cartoonish representations of costume masks and images of impersonators to further transform and expand his image. The image of Obama’s face becomes less about the 44th president than the notion of representation itself.

Giles’ work makes reference to moments of 20th-century abstraction including Dada, Cubism, and Surrealism in which European artists appropriated non-Western visual traditions in an effort to expand the boundaries of pictorial representation and to level critique on Western society. Sculptural works in this show also reference “life” and “death masks”, traditionally made by taking plaster casts from the faces of important public figures and criminals alike to both commemorate greatness and study the supposed biology of dispossessed and transgressive individuals.

In this exhibition, Giles explores notions of mimicry and abstraction and questions monolithic presentations of identity at the intersection of celebrity and race. In these masks and performances, we find both aspirational mimesis and derogatory mockery, both of which equally comprise our collective experience of Black identity. These images ask the viewer to contend with contradictory visions of Blackness and to navigate the multiple streams of memory and perception that constitute our readings of race and identity in America.

This exhibition runs concurrently with “The Practice and Science of Drawing a Sharp White Background” another solo exhibition of Danny Giles’ work at the University of Washington’s Jacob Lawrence Gallery where Giles is the 2019 Jacob Lawrence Legacy Resident. Exhibition support is made possible by SOIL gallery and the Jacob Lawrence Gallery.

Danny Giles is a Chicago-based artist who makes work that often brings together live performance, video, and sculpture to address the dilemmas of representing and performing identity and interrogate histories of oppression and creative resistance. Giles received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011, his MFA from Northwestern University in 2013, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. Giles’ work has been exhibited, performed and screened at the Luminary, St. Louis, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, El Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Giles is currently a 2019 BOLT Artist-in-Residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition. Giles is part-time faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Academic Director of the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Saugatuck, MI.