Up against the wall
Tony Gray takes retro look at Black Panthers, fairies and mermaids
You can practically smell the heady, retro scents of Jean Nate and Charlie waft off artist Tony Gray’s girly paintings.
An artist surely in touch with his pink and fluffy side, Gray uses a feminine arsenal of effects to unleash some wicked cultural critique in his “Fairy,” “Panther” and “Mermaid” series currently on view at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery.
His “Black Fairy” features a ponytailed Afro beauty against a backdrop of lime-popsicle green to typify Gray’s highly ornamental, whimsical style. Painted with the humble material of colored pencil and acrylic on panel, the image depicts a winsome, pouty doll in frosted lipstick and ’60s-style shorty dress hovering via psychedelic wings above the earth. The image taps into the otherworldly quality makes fashion such an intoxicating force.
Gray explores the ways blackness has worked itself into culture through the vestments of glamour and style. The fairy hovers above the regular black folk who appear as blank, wondering everypeople down below. Like Beverly Johnson, Iman, Diana Ross or any of the fashion models, celebrities and actresses who represent a world apart, these lovely dolls rise above the mundane, nitty-gritty of black life, and float in the rarefied ether of beauty, fame and fortune.
Those people on the ground below seem decidedly real, but Gray’s fairies have the perfect quality of an eternally young advertising ideal. Like Mia Farrow circa 1967, these girlish Mary Quant fairies reflect the desired beauty favored in the ’60s and ’70s, which could take threatening black female sexuality and render it banal, benign and childlike. The leggy, fashion-savvy subjects of “Black Fairy” could have filled the composition notebooks of young girls coming of age in the ’60s and ’70s.
Both the “Fairy” and”Mermaid” series show how black and ethnic types have been neutered by becoming pop culture ornament. In “Mermaid” the repertoire of ethereal, mythic sprites expands to those sexy sea creatures with the half fish-half human body. Men enter the mix in “Mermaid” as lean, toned, soul-patched hotties with mermaid tails and an ambisexual provocativeness. Again, the sexy, banal vernacular of fashion neutralizes the black “threat.”
While so many contemporary artists channel the angst- ridden, testosterone-fueled genre of the counter-cultural comic, Gray’s work proves refreshingly frisky, snarky and girly. The Guy Thing is supposed to express rage, sex and fury when it addresses mass culture, but Gray’s bag is more sly and unexpected for its pastel femininity and for referencing a more decorative, subdued form of pop.
Gray’s “Panthers” series are equally rooted in the look and feel of the age and feature drawings and collages done on sheets of vintage wallpaper, like the archeological remnants of a teenage bedroom transposed to a gallery setting.
In Gray’s “Panther” series, his work takes on a more humorous, critical dimension that helps illustrate the intent of his more subtle “Mermaid” and “Fairy” work. Using strips of vintage wallpaper — harvest gold sunbursts and op art black and white — Gray evokes the comical touchstones of a retro age. His funky wallpaper backdrops are decorated with cut-out images of white and black cowboys from pulp Western book covers, black and white pretty boys romping in gay porn or Grace Jones integrating James Bond in a movie poster for A View to a Kill.
Amid these benign images of black-and-white togetherness are Gray’s repeated illustrations of a cartoonish Panther figure, a sleek dude who brandishes a gun and knife but looks about as menacing as the Pink Panther. The Panther recurs like a sitcom character and paces through this fakey pop world, injecting an edge of critique by his presence alone. These collages use the actual material of American media to comment amusingly on how “black” is inserted into culture as an exotic dash of “Other.”
“The New Black is Black” also includes six images painted on wood which have a folk art, Bill Traylor quality and depict black “Star Trek” characters and beefy Shaft hero Richard Roundtree. The works continue Gray’s interest in black archetypes in the media, a little ad nauseum by this time.
Gray draws more of his angular, lean and mean Black Panthers on appropriated book page illustrations of all-white cavemen, Scottish bagpipers and other scenes of Whitey Through History. By merely echoing previous ideas to less visually arresting effect, this proves the weakest phase of the project.
Funky, amusing and edgy, “The New Black is Black” demonstrates the Atlanta College of Art’s continued interest in bringing fresh, happening, race-oriented art work to a local audience. The only question for color-sensitive Atlantans is, “Can you dig it?”