Spotlight, by Devan Shimoyama, portrays one of the artist’s friends who has sat for numerous portraits over the years, including the painting Chakra Chart as well as some of Shimoyama’s Barber Shop paintings. In this portrait, he is seen pensively sitting in a spotlight, resting his face on his hands, gazing through bejeweled eyes. Shimoyama made the work during the pandemic during a time when he was forced to be away from the studio, and it debuted in Devan Shimoyama. All The Rage, the artist’s first European solo museum exhibition, which opened on June 19, 2021, at Kunstpalais, Erlangen, Germany.

The work is connected to Shimoyama’s ongoing aesthetic exploration of alternative masculinity through adorned, fantastical images of the Black, queer, male body. Through the media of painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation, Shimoyama presents figures that are perceived as both desirable and desirous. He is aware of the politics of queer culture, and the ways in which those politics relate to black American culture. These elements come together in his works in a way that is celebratory and also complicated. The celebratory aspects of Shimoyama's work come through in his choice of materials, which include fur, feathers, glitter and costume jewels. Many of the men in Shimoyama's works also literally have jewels in their eyes, endowing them with a mystified, often vacant expression, interrupting the connection between their inner selves and the viewer, and suggesting a sort of silent suffering. Many are also shedding tears.

“Mixed media allows me to be more direct,” he says. “A lot of the materials I use are ornate, bought at stores where you would buy couture gowns, or where drag queens might buy fabric to construct a fantasy. There’s content in those materials, specific to different memories and experiences and messages. I’m thinking about branding and culture and peacocking – how what you’re wearing reflects some kind of status of yourself. The materials reflect how I think about constructing identity, and possibly code switching from era to era.”