Art Cologne

Sakhile&Me is pleased to participate in Art Cologne from 7 to 10 November 2024 with a collaborative presentation of new works by Mario Joyce and Kevin Demery in Booth A211 (Hall 11.2). It will mark both artists’ first time showing at the fair.

Both Mario Joyce and Kevin Demery think about what happens to meaning, understanding, and implications in the way we revisit historical events in the present. The artists’ respective research and process-driven work deals with specific and collective histories of Black American life, with careful consideration of childhood and how early experiences ricochet and reverberate into and through adulthood. Their practices overlap in content but are expressed in aesthetically and materially different ways, using assemblage and collage as a way of juxtaposing seemingly disparate and yet literally or metaphorically connected images, words, and objects.

In his collage paintings, Mario Joyce embeds soil sourced from the farm he grew up on in Southwest Ohio as a Queer, Black boy in a family with little income. The artist parallels his coming-of-age experiences with his ancestors working land they did not own, unacknowledged for their contributions to America’s generational wealth. Also embedded within his thickly gestural painted canvases are bodies fashioned after his own likeness, like avatars of himself nodding to his grandfathers and the men in his family who came before him. The avatars are made from cut-out segments of vintage magazines and old photographs the artist has been collecting, showing sprawling landscape views of the mid-west region he grew up in. More recently, views of the shorelines, skies, and sunsets on the Westcoast where he now resides are contrasted with black-and-white views of war scenes from the civil war. Amongst the black and white images is a photograph of one of the artist’s uncles who fought during the civil war – many Black American men were coerced into serving and fighting for the confederacy, without compensation or acknowledgement for their sacrifices.

Joyce also incorporates soil from the farm he grew up on as a material but also spiritual witness and vessel holding and itself a part of his upbringing; the beautiful experiences as well as the transgressions made against his body. At the same time, the soil holds historically significant moments that predate the artist and his own ancestors to include indigenous peoples and the annual cycle of crops that passed through and left imprints of themselves in it.

In a similar way, Kevin Demery’s wooden windchimes and anagram word puzzles represent material and immaterial signifiers, pulling on associative readings of objects. The windchimes portray the side profile of George Stinney Jr., the youngest person in U.S. recorded history to have been executed by electric chair following a sham trial in June 1944 in South Carolina. Alongside the windchimes, the artist creates a series of wooden word puzzle works with anagrams, leaning into “embedded meaning” or “revised meaning” with words like EDUCATION transforming into CAUTION and DEMOCRACY to COMDRADE.

Demery’s sculptures and Joyce’s paintings gesture towards shared histories of generations of Black Americans, specifically the experience of young Black males, whose embodied encounters with state-sanctioned violence, social hostility, and their heritage continues to demand accountability in its various forms. Meditating on symbolism and reconfiguration in turn catalyzes a layered way of seeing, thinking, revisiting, and re-membering and insists on this acknowledgement in both figurative and literal terms.