The Jackson State University Department of Art presents “Stuck between ‘lizabeth taylor’s toes,” an exhibition by conceptual artist Felandus Thames on display at the Dollye M.E. Robinson Gallery September 4 – November 6, Monday – Friday, from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. The exhibit’s opening reception is Thursday, Sept. 4, from 4 to 6 p.m.
Thames, a self-described Black artist who strives to produce work that is self-critical, said the exhibition takes its inspiration directly from the poetry of Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones).
Thames received an undergraduate degree from JSU and is currently living and practicing in the greater New York area. He was the 2005 recipient of the Mississippi Individual Artist Fellowship, which is awarded to one artist per discipline annually by the Mississippi Arts Commission. Subsequently, he attended the graduate program in painting and printmaking at the Yale University School of Art where he received his MFA in 2010. At Yale, Thames developed relationships with Robert Farris Thompson, Peter Halley, Carrol Dunham, Byron Kim, Robert Storr, and Lyle Ashton Harris and was thusly influenced to expand his studio practice into a more conceptual space.
Thames’ work explores our relationship to the ready-made and how they can become surrogates for their user’s ethnology and gender. His work attempts to transcend didacticisms that are typically associated with anachronistic understandings of representation and instead aligns itself with ideas around taxonomy of human difference. He is also interested in the interplay between the personal narrative and the imagined.
A lynchpin in his practice is to assemble two ideas or objects from high and degenerate culture to create a conversation. He also uses humor, which is increasingly important to the work, as it allows the viewer to ease into disconcerting motifs. Because he wishes to make objects that have a life beyond that of the initial intent, the work – often probing and unsettling – poses questions rather than answer them. His work shifts the beholder’s role from voyeur to participant, and complicates his personal relationship to the work.
Recent group exhibitions include “Else”, Tilton Gallery, New York; “Curate New York” and “Black Portrait,” Rush Gallery New York; “T_XT_RT” and “Voices of Home,” Jenkins Johnson, New York; “Art by Choice” and “Artist by Artist” at Mississippi Museum of Art, Aspen Museum of Art and ArtBasel, in Miami Beach. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Tilton Gallery and Jenkins Johnson Gallery in New York and a two-person show at Columbia University.
Thames was recently a Louis Comfort Tiffany Prize Nominee and exhibited at the 2013 Presidential Inaugural Ball. He has been mentioned in numerous periodicals including the New York Times, International Review of African American Art and Art in America. Thames’ work can be found in a myriad of private and public collections both in the United States and abroad.
For more information contact LaNeysa Harris at 601-979-0879 or laneysa.v.harris@jsums.edu.