FLY IN ANY WEATHER
Vitus Shell
9.2.2022-9.23.2022
Closing Reception | Friday, September 23: 5-8 pm
Online Artist Talk with Khia Thompson Thursday, September 22 @ 6pm on ZOOM
Closing Reception | Friday, September 23: 5-8 pm
Join us for a closing reception, co-hosted by our neighbors Rendz Blendz Prokutz and She Styles!
Both the gallery and barber shop will be open 5-8 with food and refreshments. Come see the art brought to life and share in celebrating the exhibition and local creativity.
Fly in Any Weather is an exhibition of new mixed-media paintings by Louisiana-based artist Vitus Shell. Shell’s powerful, life-size portraits “deconstruct, sample, and remix identity, civil rights, and contemporary Black culture” as a way of centering both the Black experience and a Black audience.
Shell is a collector, and the grounds of each painting start with layers of collaged text and imagery, often sourced from vintage magazines such as Ebony, Essence, and Jet. In this way, each portrait of a contemporary person is built upon and within layers of cultural history, creating a visual metaphor for the connection between person and environment. The paintings in “Fly in Any Weather” are the latest in Shell’s “Gold Everything” series. The use of gold in the work reflects a multitude of references, influences, and social concerns. Gold in the work speaks to the heavy gilded frames of art history and the gold chains and watches in the Trinidad James song from which the series gets its name. It’s a celebration of glamour, success—a crown, a halo—but it is also a critique of colonial trade and capitalism (when we encounter a $ sign, is it a cartoon symbol or is it symbolic of a system?) In Shell’s work, all of these different concerns, tones, and allusions can exist together, embedded and embossed much like the painted surfaces themselves. Framing also serves as an important aperture for these paintings. The life-size figures exist with—but not within—their painted faux-frame. For Shell, this compositional choice is about emphasizing a lack of perfection or sense of absolute, of letting the raw edge of the canvas show and boundaries be broken. It’s a way of creating a space for Black folks “to just be.”
In this exhibition, women take center stage. Hands in their pockets, hips swayed, they exude both power and ease. For the figurative part of his paintings, Shell shifts his style to a highly descriptive realism that captures and honors the agency of these women to define and fashion themselves. The details are key—a patterned shirt, a streak of purple eyeshadow, a glittering earring, the tilt of a hat—they are what make the person and the painting unique. Community is at the heart of Shell’s practice, and he sees the relationship between artist and model as a collaboration: a merging of portraiture and self-portraiture. He often holds open-calls for models and the goal is not just a painting but a conversation. And once completed, the work continues that conversation—in the gallery space and in the community—the painting becoming a version of gilded mirror in which people are seen and able to see themselves.
Vitus Shell is a mixed-media collage painter born in Monroe, LA, where he lives and works. His work is geared toward the black experience, giving agency to people from this community through powerful images deconstructing, sampling, and remixing identity, civil rights, and contemporary black culture. He received a BFA from Memphis College of Art, 2000 and an MFAfrom the University of Mississippi, 2008.Vitus Shell has been in residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Anderson Ranch ArtCenter, Hermitage Artist Retreat, Mass MoCA, Joan Mitchell Center, Skowhegan School of Art,and Masur Museum of Art. To date, he has accumulated an impressive list of achievements, some of which include: participating in exhibits at universities, museums, and private galleries across the country including The McKenna Museum of African American Art, Stephen F. Austin University, Miami University, Oxford, OH ; painted murals for the National Civil Rights Museum’s NBA Pioneers exhibit, Indianola City Pool in Indianola, MS, Union Parish Elementary School in Farmerville, LA; and being commissioned to do public art by the Memphis UrbanArt Commission. Shell has received numerous grants including the Joan Mitchell MFA Award. As of 2020, Vitus Shell is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Louisiana Tech University.