Jamal Cyrus’ (b. 1973, Houston) expansive practice draws on the languages of collage and assemblage, and explores the evolution of African American identity within Black political movements and the African diaspora.He is engaged with an aesthetic practice that aims to transform the most mundane materials into objects with rich, densely packed networks of meaning and purpose.
Since 2019, the artist has been utilizing denim as a raw material, transforming old jeans and their cotton thread into rich painterly abstractions. In the artist’s words, he is attempting “to use the materials and format of the quilt to document aspects of black political history.” Whether mining FBI files of Black activists and artists, or exposing underknown corners of the Black American experience, Cyrus’ project acknowledges how loss, failure, tragedy and hardship function to fuel hope, resistance, and progress within Black American culture, presenting the viewer with an expanded understanding of American history.
Shaun O'Dell (b. 1968, Beeville, TX) creates drawings, videos, music, and sculpture that explore the intertwining realities of human and natural orders and critique the destructive nature of the American myth of manifest destiny. Since 2018, O’Dell has been exploring his own family history as a lens through which to view the roots of modern-day issues of environmental and climatological change. In these new works, O’Dell laments the pillaging of Native American land, peoples, and resources at the hands of colonial settlers, whose attitudes and perilous practices set the stage for subsequent generations of racialized oppression and environmental neglect.
Using gouache, and acrylic ink on toned paper, O’Dell references the colonial histories of his ancestors while highlighting the indigenous flora and fauna of the Cumberland Plateau region, where his family settled from Germany in the early 1800s. Using this taxonomy of objects, plants, and animals, the artist tried to step into the eyes of his ancestors and see what they might have seen, and also what they were blind to, arriving amid the colonial devastation of the people and forests of the region.
Demetrius Oliver (b. 1975, Brooklyn, NY) is known for creating elegant, improvisatory, site-specific installations using photography, sculpture and video to record the act of sidereal observation itself. His work draws heavily on a variety of disparate intellectual interests related to interpreting phenomena, including American transcendentalism, music of the spheres, and the history of cosmology, weaving them into spectacular, cohesive works of self-exploration and expression. Relying on ordinary materials and found imagery, Oliver creates artworks that bring visual form to the processes of exploration and experimentation referencing musical, scientific and literary materials.
OIiver’s paintings at the Armory explore abstraction while handling prosaic materials as mark- making tools. The works are made with umbrella parts collected after rainstorms. He arranges the discarded findings, then sprays the entire surface with paint. The outcome is a vaporous composition informed by photography and darkroom processes, such as cyanotypes and photograms. With improvisation and control being dual factors in Oliver’s practice, the paintings are part of a multidisciplinary studio inquiry into air, temperature, earth and atmospheric phenomena as an attempt to render such occurrences through abstract means.
Robyn O'Neil's (born 1977, Omaha, NE) prodigious career places her in the company of some of the great landscape artists in the history of art. Known for her detailed narrative drawings that often contain art historical references, her work ranges from the most intimate of renderings to monumental multi-paneled works. Often surreal or symbolic, her drawings reference personal narratives and art historical allusions, all while dealing with themes of memory, identity and climate crises.
For the 2022 Armory Show, we are presenting a large-scale work on canvas, “For Glory (The Whale).” O’Neil’s whale, notably removed from the water, is loosely based on Jacob Matham’s print “Beached Whale” (1598), in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her signature “men in sweatsuits,” although retired within the arc of the artist’s grand narrative, make a one-off appearance within the composition. Although there are no clear signs of violence, the men appear to be descending upon and attacking this great creature. However, no matter what is happening to the whale, he is the one who is in control. “He is wise and the only one looking at us,” O’Neil says. “The men are aimless and idiotic and doing absolutely nothing really. Their presence is somehow problematic though seemingly benign.”
Over the course of her career, O’Neil has brilliantly charted the tragicomic absurdity of mankind’s negligent and blatant disregard for nature and the environment. The time of the men in sweatsuits is no more and has become a fantasy of a bygone era. The men no longer have power; in O’Neil’s works, Nature is in complete control.
Alexis Pye (born 1995, Detroit, MI) is a Houston-based artist whose practice explores the tradition of portraiture to express the Black body outside of its social constructs. Her most recent exhibition (Summer 2021) focused on Black men situated within garden settings. Placing her subjects in leisurely, luscious, and even fantastical settings, her works evoke, as the artist states, “playfulness, wonder and Blackness, as well as the joys amidst adversity.” In her overall body of work, Pye aims to challenge society’s assumptions and stereotypes surrounding Black masculinity by focusing on a more gentle, softer view of the male figures in her paintings.
Included in the Armory presentation are recently completed small gouache paintings surrounded by an artist-made punch-stitch embroidery frame. The figurative imagery is pulled from various sources, including found photographs, illustrations from books, and the artist’s own family archives. The punch-stitch frame is an integral compositional strategy that acts as both a window for the painting and a conceptual tool to challenge distinctions between art and craft by juxtaposing faster image-making with labor-intensive embroidery.