David Shrobe: Riding the Wind's Back

David Shrobe Riding the Shrobe Wind’s Back David Riding the Wind’s Back

Front Cover: Ascension, 2021 (detail) Back Cover: Surveyors of Stars, 2021 (detail)

David Shrobe Riding the Wind’s Back Septemebr 18 - October 30, 2021

Essay by Kekeli Sumah Edited by Staci Boris Photographed by Robert Chase Heishman

This catalogue was published on the occasion of David Shrobe’s first solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

©2021

Table of Contents Introduction

11

Essay

15

Installation views

20

Artworks

32

Biographies

63

Introduction

moniquemeloche is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by New York born artist David Shrobe. Riding the Wind’s Back, meticulously carved and painted assemblage structures investigate the coexistence of hybrid identities and notions of a collective remembrance reimagined. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and first in Chicago.

Mining archival, biographical, art historical, and literary sources, Shrobe’s new assemblage paintings build on the artist’s interest in folklore and creation mythologies, utilizing the allegorical language of flight drawn from diasporic traditions to conjure liberatory modes of mobility into imagined futures.

Shrobe’s cosmologies situate heroic ancestors, toppled statue heads, and spiritual entities to mediate between earthly and spiritual realms of existence. Fashioned from found and inherited items, Shrobe intuitively links the various materials used both formally and conceptually in service of unfolding intergenerational narratives. Imbued with images of confederate and historic monuments, alongside the disregarded essences from the artist’s Harlem neighborhood, Shrobe reflects on past Black experiences and creates mystic hope for new ones.

The luminous, incandescent color palette is juxtaposed with black and white graphite drawing to further confound the viewer’s sense of time, uniting the worlds of the present, past, and future. Each fragmented figure is depicted in a ghostly outline, exerting an ethereal presence of being which hovers throughout the imagined landscapes they self-govern. Weightless bodies ascend into the deep twilight and the liminal thresholds they occupy; intertwined in moments of embrace and touch, they project their own interior lives in contemplative states of self-discovery. The protector figure is often represented by the recurring female incarnation, evocative of the artists’ relationship to the women in his family, as the bearers of knowledge and heritage. Dangling pull chain and hardware evoke notions of Lady Justice, confronting the viewer with a renewed sense of justice, favoring those who spread their wings and rise.

Riding the Wind’s Back, a title borrowed from a poem and a work included in the exhibition, alludes to the idea of journey and agency; giving the figures the ability to be free floating and fluid in a renewed movement. Shrobe forms the identity of his characters by collaging together conceptions of time to create portals into transitory spaces and new understandings of existence.

Essay

David Shrobe: People Are Centered

by Kekeli Sumah People are centered in the painted and assembled works of New York born artist David Shrobe.

The paintings deploy a variety of gestures—deliberate and intuitive—to produce beautifully enigmatic works that appear found. The surface is an illusion. At times, it is a layered film with grit, color and shape, while in other moments, it becomes a taut window into a subject whose name and identity is just out of reach. These paintings are of people, or more accurately, they are of characters composed from likenesses of friends, family, and at times, even the artist himself.

In thinking about the history of painting, one can see a history of surface manipulation through color, shape and line. For Shrobe, this engagement is across a multitude of disciplines, including: collage, sculpture, painting and drawing. The lessons of composition, surface manipulation, and tension gained through his experience with other disciplines are distilled into his paintings, which plumb questions of identity, hybridity, and Blackness, while situating portraiture as a mode of research and exploration.

Within the genre of portraiture in painting, the intent of the painter is often to represent a human subject in their full likeness. This act of representation is meant to go beyond mere outward appearance; it’s supposed to capture some kind of inner significance—their true identity—their true selves, their soul. In this light, portraiture becomes an act of remembrance—a record, even if fabricated or idealized. But do the subjects of Shrobe have a soul that can be represented or captured in a painting? They don’t—and not because they are wanting of life, rather they are brimming with the souls of multiple lives, narratives and histories. Shrobe’s figures are shrouded in enigmatic energy, operating on a symbolic plane.

The figures often appear fragmented; they are a combination of parts pulled from art history, familial figures, lyrical prose, and personal signification. They exist as hybrids, whose manifold identities are made manifest through dark and murky compositions set against sensuous and curvilinear fields of color. It is in this manner that Shrobe is able to work with abstraction in order to explore gesture and mark-making through form, color and assemblage. In these moments, the indices of play and spontaneity find their way into the work, appearing as a pull chain on Everything Flows Through Her, or a fallen and slumped pale head in Surveyors of Stars.

Yet, through it all, the figure remains steadfast, along with their gaze. Shrobe’s subjects are neither hostile nor overtly confrontational. Most of them avert their gaze (Surrender to the Air, Ascension, Drop Me Off in Harlem) either out of avoidance or perhaps captivated by a mystery lurking just past the viewer. Others, like Liberty on My Side, and Trickster Whom We Must Become, engage the viewer with full awareness of their own subjectivity, and a galaxy behind their eyes. This plays into Shrobe’s use of daguerreotypes as visual reference for the subjects in these paintings. Rather than nostalgia, Shrobe pulls from the mythic qualities daguerreotypes had in the early history of photography, when imaging eyes and faces gave a viewer access to portals into the soul. This raises a question that encircles the impetus behind the work: what lurks within the souls of Black folk?

Unsurprisingly, Shrobe complicates our response. Of mixed heritage across ethnic, racial and spiritual categories, Shrobe is deeply aware of the identities, histories and narratives that forge human experiences. Such depth comes to life through the cornucopia of materials that find their way into his studio practice. Sourcing pieces from his family home in Harlem, his neighborhood and the studio, Shrobe brings notions of identity, history and memory to the surface through collage, assemblage and bas relief. It’s not forced; it’s simply embedded in the work through the legacies of materials inherited from a bygone time.

David Shrobe, Surrender to the Air, 2021 (detail)

Employed and arranged, the play between negative and positive space in the works, whether raised or illusory, activates the embedded material histories through various acts of distortion and transformation. Storytelling becomes alive, raising themes of presence, belonging and genealogy: who am I and where do I fit? Drop Me Off in Harlem, and Surrender to the Air echo these ideas with Afro-futurist and surrealist sensibilities.

Still the question remains: what lurks within the souls of Black folk? After studying the work of David Shrobe, it would seem that perhaps what lurks there—similar to what lurks in the souls of all folk—are the fragmented and assembled histories, narratives and memories of those who’ve walked before us, that is to say: people are centered in our souls.

Installation views

Artworks

Trickster Whom We Must Become, 2021 Oil, acrylic, ink, charcoal, faux suede, leather, suede, silk on canvas mounted on board in artist frame 37 x 30 x 1 in 94 x 76.2 x 2.5 cm

Detail

Drop Me Off in Harlem, 2021 Acrylic, ink, and printed cloth on canvas, mounted on board in wood frame behind non glare glass 34 x 27 x 1 1/2 in 86.4 x 68.6 x 3.8 cm

Detail

Surrender to the Air, 2021 Acrylic, ink, faux suede and collaged photo print on canvas mounted on board in wood frame behind non glare glass 34 x 27 in 86.4 x 68.6 cm

Detail

Ascension, 2021 acrylic, ink, velvet flocking, silk, and linen on canvas in wood frame with gold leaf behind glass 35 x 28 x 2 in 88.9 x 71.1 x 5.1 cm

Detail

Petite Maroonage, 2021 oil, acrylic, graphite, pencil, black charcoal, white charcoal, linen, acrylic, silk, embroidered wool, flocking, painted paper, sandpaper and wood 66 x 48 x 1.5 in.

167.6 x 121.9 x 3.8 cm

Detail

Shall We Fly, 2021 Acrylic, ink, colored pencil on canvas, linen and suede on Arches cold press paper mounted on museum board in white oak wood frame behind non-glare glass 34 x 26 x 1 in.

86.4 x 66 x 2.5 cm

Detail

Everything Flows Through Her, 2021 Acrylic and ink on canvas mounted on board, painted mirror frame, carved wood headboard 50 x 47 x 2 in 127 x 119.4 x 5.1 cm

Detail

Liberty on My Side , 2021 oil, acrylic, charcoal, gemstones, linen, felt, leather, wool, canvas, wood 48 x 40 x 2 in.

121.9 x 101.6 x 5.1 cm

Detail

Surveyors of Stars , 2021 oil and acrylic on canvas, acrylic on wood, wood furniture parts, acrylic on flocking, linoleum floor tile, silk print, wool chambray and acrylic fabric, and wood mounted on carved wood 72 x 55 x 1 1/2 in 182.9 x 139.7 x 3.8 cm

Detail

Moonwalk with Monuments, 2021 Oil, acrylic, graphite on wood, flocking, leather, suede, vinyl, velvet, and wood 77 x 56 x 2 in 195.6 x 142.2 x 5.1 cm

Detail

Riding the Wind’s Back, 2021 Oil on canvas, acrylic and white charcoal on linen, acrylic and colored pencil on wood, and canvas, silk, suede, wool chambray, canvas, acrylic, and faux suede fabrics mounted on joined carved wood 77 x 60 x 1 1/2 in 195.6 x 152.4 x 3.8 cm

Detail

Erected, 2021 Oil on canvas, acrylic on paper and mixed media collage with antique print on paper mounted on board in wood frame behind non glare glass 13 x 10 in 33 x 25.4 cm

Detail

Cut through the Air, 2021 Oil, acrylic, antique print, flocking and linen on paper mounted on board in wood frame behind non glare glass 13 x 10 in.

33 x 25.4 cm

Detail

Biographies

David Shrobe (b.1974, New York) lives l and works in New York. He holds an MFA and a BFA in painting from Hunter College. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was a Joan Mitchell Artist Teaching Fellow. Shrobe’s work is currently on view in The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, and in Lineages: Works from the Collection at NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL. Shrobe has had recent solo exhibitions at Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY; and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA. His work was included in group exhibitions at CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm, Sweden; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and New York; Mandeville Gallery at Union College, Schenectady, NY; the Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. He has shown at numerous art fairs including EXPO Chicago, Untitled Miami Beach, a solo booth at The Armory Show, and most recently, a solo presentation in Art Basel OVR:Portals. Shrobe’s work is held in the Permanent Collections of The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Block Museum, Evanston, Illinois; Union College, Schenectady, New York; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon; and NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale.

Curatorial Fellow Kekeli Sumah is an artist, curator, and designer living in Chicago whose practice is interested in history, agency, and visual culture. His work has been exhibited at Università Ca’ Foscari, as part of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, as well as at Sullivan Galleries (Chicago), Supernova Gallery (Chicago), and Galerie 73 (Vienna, Austria). As the Driehaus Museum’s (Chicago) first Curatorial Fellow, Sumah curated A Tale of Today: Nate Young and Mika Horibuchi, in addition to pioneering and leading the Emerging Artists Fellowship. He holds a BFA, a BAVCS, and an March from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622 For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com