Don’t Forget to Pack a Lunch!, Jake Troyli’s first solo show with the gallery since joining the roster, and his first in Chicago. Jake Troyli investigates the construction of otherness and the commodification of the Black/Brown body, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value, challenging the erroneous notion that it is only through arduous performances of labor that value and importance are earned.
Jake Troyli in Conversation with Danny Dunson
Transcribed from an interview hosted virtually from moniquemeloche, Chicago Presented by New Art Dealer’s Alliance (NADA) on October 1, 2020
Danny Dunson: Jake, with your exhibition Don’t Forget to Pack a Lunch!, you have asserted yourself within each work. In the first gallery, you encounter the smaller scale portraits, which contain close range views of the body and the face portrayed with different poses and expressions. Tell me about what we see in this first room and why is it so important that you insert your own identity in your work?
Jake Troyli: I’m really interested in the idea of my own image or form as an elastic avatar; as this figure that I can manipulate, stretch, contort and pose in my compositions. When I was considering the layout of the show, I knew I wanted to separate the larger works and the small works. I wanted to start my viewers off with the smaller, more intimate self-portraits in the first gallery. This way they would develop a one-to-one relationship with the portrait– there is an immediate subject. As the viewer, you function as the spectator and you begin to build this rapport with the subject that changes as you move into the second gallery, where the larger scale works are displayed.
DD: What are you resisting in these works? What are you beckoning the viewer to look more closely at? What are you giving them access to?
JT: I definitely think that there’s this idea of voyeurism that’s present in all of my work, and I’m interested in that relationship, the dynamic between the spectacle and the audience. I do want there to be a complexity in that relationship– it’s not black and white, not clearly defined. Within the work there is this exposure, but also a willingness to be exposed. That idea of exposure is important to me not just in the smaller self-portraits, but in the larger works, too.
DD: You lure us in with your inviting palette, which is sumptuous, rich, layered, and vibrant. Even when you’re addressing serious subject matter, there’s something theatrical, whimsical, somewhat comical, and graphic about this body of work. How are you exploring those themes throughout your practice and particularly within the show?
JT: When you talk about the palette and the way that the images are so graphic, I think back to my earliest influences. When I was around eight or nine, my mom got me a subscription to MAD magazine and I remember being struck by the graphics in the magazine immediately. The comic’s palette was used in a really subversive way, because the subject matter that the magazine was exploring was not lighthearted, they were digging deep. I appreciate that method of giving the viewer access immediately, through seduction. When you first see graphic illustrations, they’re very bright and bold. This creates a complex relationship with the subject matter. You’re brought in with this sort of immediate enticement that is illustrative, beautiful and smooth, and as you get into the work, you have to re-examine what it is you’re looking at.
DD: When you speak of this elastic avatar version of yourself, you offer this incredibly friendly, accessible, smoothed-out figure that is so inviting. You’re a man of color and when someone sees you, they could make all of these summations and come to these false conclusions. In your work, you’ve made the viewer question their desensitization to those possibly harmful assumptions. How does that make you feel personally– that you almost dilute some of the potency of who you are to make it palatable for every viewer? What does that say, not about you, but about the viewership of society?
JT: I mean, it’s one of the things that I think about a lot, especially when you’re considering the black male form and the black male figure, there’s a kind of a pushback against that immediate response that some people have. I’ve always thought about the nudity in my work as kind of working in that same vein, there is this simultaneous hyper-vulnerability, and strange empowerment that comes from the form itself being completely exposed. I’m interested in this idea that the subject is, although it’s free and it’s commanding its own space, it’s also at the mercy of its viewer. For me that’s a theme that I’m exploring and working out as the paintings develop, something that I have to continue to reconcile with. I think sometimes in the studio we’re working through things that we’re feeling in real time, and it’s definitely something that’s always on my mind.
DD: There’s no separation from the art for you, which is actually something I love about you and I love about your work. Even though these are depictions of yourself, they have contemporary hairstyles and characteristics that are very readily recognized, they are culturally charged, and theatrical, almost performative. Can you guide us through your thoughts on the performance of what we see in the work, Deposition in Burberry?
JT: It’s an anecdotal thing. My mom grew up doing community theater, so I was around that a lot. One of the things I became fascinated with was this idea of shitty set design. I like bad design and think about how much it takes for something to be convincing, and that scale is something that I play with in my work. If you look at some of the smaller paintings, there are these backdrops that are rendered in a much more classical way as compared to larger works that have these flattened spaces, the illusion of depth, and the idea of a spotlight. I am considering the idea of the backdrop as this idyllic space in front of which the characters are posed, playing a different and specific part in each composition. When I start to think about the subject as a performer and about materialism as costume, then everything goes into creating this moment that we all have access to as the viewer. There’s so much potential when you start to consider human beings constantly performing based on a certain environment or a situation, as a means of self-preservation and adaptation. It is code-switching. One of the things that I think about so much is the relationship between theory and lived experience. When I learned what code-switching was, I was in grad school. A white dude taught me that word, but I had been doing it all my life. In hindsight, it’s really interesting that it was so natural for me, so integral to my life, but also functions as theory.
DD: I was talking to you earlier about the performance mechanisms in your practice, and you said something really interesting about the choice of flatness in the background of your work. You’ve erased all of that lustrous prop-making and you’ve replaced it with simple scenery, and they become this skyline of flat images behind the subject. Yet in the foreground we have these layered three-dimensional bodies which are all in conversation with one another. It’s almost like the past simplicity and the present heightened complexity of consumerism. Which can be seen, again, in the work Deposition in Burberry.
JT: I have this really complicated relationship with consumerism, and I think about duality a lot in my work. I’m fascinated with and in love with objects– material goods, and I think that there’s this idea of upward mobility or taking something to get close to something else. With the representation of Polo and Burberry, and how we can use use these things as cos-tume to achieve a sense of status. With the work Deposition in Burberry, I was thinking about this shawl that I could never afford, but wanted to wrap myself in. When I was composing this piece, I was looking at Rogier Van der Weyden’s work Deposition of Christ (c.1435), as the faces on his figures have always been really fascinating to me. There is this strangeness to them, an oddity that I think is really important to explore when you start to consider the idea of grief as a performative expression.
DD: That performative expression of grief shows up in this very contemporary way. When we think of police violence against Black people and a kind of opting out of a certain personal responsibility or collective responsibility for those who are non-Black. There are also many who are opting in, but there’s this space in between– this performance space, which I think your work is really exploring.
JT: I consider this a lot. There are works in this show that are pretty clearly diving into this idea of performative activism and what it means. I mean, sometimes we have to wonder how much of a difference there really is between actual tears and the performative grief. How do we know? We talk about Instagram, we talk about all these platforms in which imagery and ideas are so quickly transmitted. There’s something to be said about that line being blurred between the two things.
DD: In your work The Demonstration, there’s the avatar motif in a coffin with all of these white men looking down at him, a person of color. They’re all mourning in a very theatrical way, but one has their eye open as if looking to see what the others are doing, and that raises so many questions.
JT: I think of these figures as competitive mourners. They’re all grieving or doing what we understand as grieving, but they’re checking in to make sure that they’re crying as hard as the next figure, to the point that their grief or their competition becomes more important even than the deceased figure that’s in front of them. Within my practice, I’ve started to bring in these other characters that I think can represent fragmentations of the self, but also to rep-resent these external entities. These pink guys are pretty, pretty dark.
DD: Identity is major theme in your work and that leads us to discuss, Don’t Forget to Pack a Lunch!. I think fundamentally, everything that you talk about throughout your practice, and particularly in this show, is seen in this large-scale work. It’s about construction, and I would go as far as to say constructing identity, and how that construction plays within a greater scheme of other constructs.
JT: I always like to consider one piece as central and everything else kind of orbiting and drawing from that central work. This is that piece for me. The work is 80 x 106 inches– it’s really big. But when you look at it at first, there’s so much happening that it encourages a thoughtful and purposeful viewership, where you have to move through these vignettes and see them all in relationship to each other. Then you pull back and can start to really take in the whole scene once you’ve engaged in the smaller moments. Every other large painting in the second gallery is drawn pretty much directly from moments in the largest piece. There are the figures up top in the marionette-stringed planes, there’s a funeral at the bottom right, the figures throughout are wearing their hard hats as they work; there’s this cyclical labor, this cyclical construction and destruction of their environment, like an ant farm. The tops of the buildings in this work are chopped off, so everything that the figures are doing, the viewer has complete access to. That’s the meat of my practice as these figures go about their futile duties under our constant supervision, and their efforts are essentially in vain because nothing is changing. But they’re hard at work and ready to clock in and clock out and clock in over and over and over again.
DD: Thank you so much, Jake. What an amazing show.
Watch the complete interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=5iPHbkfF0eA&list=UUF2h21wTjVimtbapqQxMrNQ
