For Immediate Release

JACOLBY SATTERWHITE & DEVIN TROY STROTHER Jacolby Satterwhite & Devin Troy Strother at the Hieronymous Bosch & Beyonce Giselle Knowles Carter Foundation

June 22 – July 27, 2012 Opening reception: Friday, June 22, 6 – 8 PM

Monya Rowe Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring Jacolby Satterwhite and Devin Troy Strother titled Jacolby Satterwhite & Devin Troy Strother at the Hieronymous Bosch & Beyonce Giselle Knowles Carter Foundation. The exhibition features painting, video and photography.

Jacolby Satterwhite will exhibit a 3-D animation video accompanied by photographs and silkscreens. In Reifying Desire (2012), the artist takes on a perfomative role by including himself in the video voguing and interacting with objects within a fantastical and natural landscape where animation and reality converge. The video also includes objects that are sourced from drawings by the artists’ mother, whom suffers from a mental disorder. Satterwhite’s mother creates hundreds of drawings as a means of catharsis: usually of inventions or ideas (that never come to fruition) influenced by consumer culture, medicine, fashion, surrealism, math, sex and astrology, to name a few. These inventions make their way into the video as 3D animation juxtaposed with real-life imagery of the artist. The drawings are reinvented as silkscreens and exhibited alongside the video and family photographs; each part informs the other. The family photographs temper the surrealist aspects of the video while exploring themes of memory, ritual and psychology. As the video unfolds, the viewer is immersed in an absurdist and sensual narrative embracing decadence and licentiousness. Satterwhite’s work is at once self-portraiture and an examination of sociopolitical concerns. Jacolby Satterwhite received a MFA from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 2010; a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore in 2008 and completed a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine in 2009. He was the recipient of a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in Provincetown, ME in 2010. His work has recently been exhibited in “Shift: Projects | Perspectives | Directions”, The Studio Museum in Harlem; “Oh, you mean cellophane and all that crap” (performance and video screening), Calder Foundation; and was invited by Clifford Owen to contribute to his “Anthology Project” at PS1/MOMA, all in New York. Satterwhite will have his first solo exhibition in New York and at Monya Rowe Gallery in January 2013. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Devin Troy Strother’s vivid large-scale paintings incorporate acrylic oil, construction paper, clippings from magazines, found objects and paper cutouts. The protagonists within these abstract landscapes depicted as painted cutout silhouettes of African-American females invite the viewer to join them on a wild ride as they fly through space, mischievously frolic through layers of paint and playfully attempt to imitate a Barnett Newman “zipper painting” (titled “Up and to Your Left Nigga” Said Ray Ray to Bea’Bay, 2012). Strother’s alter ego, named Quisha, acts as a curator of his paintings/exhibitions and as an actor in the performances within each painting. Essentially, Strother considers his paintings to be performances within a painting. The paintings often simultaneously comment on (and embrace) contemporary African-American culture and art history; the women are positioned in poses that memorialize the “reclining nude” represented in traditional portrait painting, while the colloquial urban speech in the titles acts as an accompanying dialogue to the story within the painting, such as, “Gurrrrrrl What’chu Know About Space and Shit” Said Key’key to Shay’Shay (2012). Devin Troy Strother received a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 2009, and completed a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME in 2010. His work has recently been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Bendixen Contemporary, Copenhagen; Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles; and Monya Rowe Gallery. Recent group exhibitions include The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (part of Harlem Postcards); Pepin Moore Gallery, Los Angeles; and Galeria Espacio Minimo, Madrid. Strother will have his second solo exhibition at Monya Rowe Gallery in September 2013 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Brooklyn, NY.

Opening reception sponsored by IZZIE

Image: Jacolby Satterwhite and Devin Troy Strother, Gurrrrrllll You Need to Stop Trippin’, 2012, exquisite corpse collaboration

Gallery Hours June: Tuesday – Saturday 11 – 6 PM July: Tuesday – Friday 11 – 6 PM. Closed July 4th. August: Closed. Upcoming: September 6, Angela Dufresne

For more information or images please contact the gallery at 212 255 5065 or [email protected]