Conversations of Portraiture

exhibit description

The main gallery features portraits from Vitus Shell’s Gold Everything series. The Louisiana artist’s large-scale mixed-media collage portraits are geared toward the black experience, giving agency through powerful images; deconstructing, sampling, and remixing identity, civil rights, and contemporary black culture. In contrast, the lobby gallery Windsor artist Yuki Horikawa offering an intimate glimpse into his subject’s inner lives by capturing their posture, expression, and clothing through the complex layered color of pastels.

Vitus Shell: Gold Everything

My current works are geared toward the black experience, giving agency to people from this community through powerful images; deconstructing, sampling, and remixing civil rights, identity, and contemporary black culture. My layered, mixed media paintings examine parallels between present day behaviors and attitudes that date back to African roots.

These portraits were created to not only give blacks a chance to just be, but also with the attempt to interject these works into the conversations of portraiture. With this work, I experiment with acrylic paint, oversized photocopies of early 20th century advertisements, and the incorporation of a foam-cut printing technique. The use of vintage advertisements allows me to create narrative based environments that comment on stereotyping, bigotry, and oppression.

Yuki Horikawa: Inner Lives

I prefer to work only with live models. By working this way, others can also see the diversity and beauty of friends and strangers alike that I meet in life. It is my hope that through my work, and its use of diverse subjects, that viewers will not only have an opportunity to experience the beauty of pastel painting but also glimpse into people’s inner worlds through capturing their posture, expression, and method of dress.

Pastel painting has a special appeal, though it is a traditional medium, in the right hands it’s also a modern one. The medium’s need for layering color uniquely reveals complexities in skin tone and textiles.

My background in fashion illustration allows me to carefully render my subject’s clothing, helping to communicate the unspoken messages that a person’s outfit can convey. In the fashion world it’s often said, “How you dress is who you are to other people.”