Devan Shimoyama: Tell Me: Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga
The Contemporary Art Center of Malaga presents the Tell Me exhibition by the artist Devan Shimoyama, his first individual exhibition in Spain.
Curated by Helena Juncosa and Fernando Francés, the exhibition brings together fifteen works created by the artist from 2020 to the present.
All the works belong to the Tarot series, in which Shimoyama reinterprets some of the traditional tarot cards through his own experience as a queer African American, translated as mystical allegories of change, evolution or transformation and deals with themes such as sexuality, gender identity and the struggle for acceptance. In the works exhibited at Tell MeInfluences of classical painting can be appreciated in terms of composition, combined with textile materials and less usual elements, typical of drag queen culture, such as glitter, rhinestones, jewelry, Swarovski crystals or sequins, as a pictorial collage. This mix of materials creates a unique visual experience.
The Tell Me [Tell Me] exhibition includes work from his latest Tarot series , in which he reinterprets the major and minor arcana cards of traditional tarot decks, which have the ability to tell and reveal hidden truths, and are used with the intention of obtaining some type of information, hence the title chosen for the exhibition.
The works presented are mostly self-portraits that represent the characters of the tarot cards, each one with its own history and symbolism, the artist also shows in his new tarot proposal relatives like his mother, which can be seen in the play L'Impératrice (2023) [The Empress] or her grandmother in the play La Papesse (2023) [The Popess]. Through these images, Shimoyama invites the viewer to look beyond the surface and explore the hidden meaning behind each work and its new reading.
The title Tell Me suggests an invitation to the viewer to surrender to the personal reading experience of these new tarot cards.
Devan Shimoyama is one of the most interesting and unique emerging artists on the current North American art scene working in the fields of painting, drawing and installation. His work explores issues related to sexuality, race and gender identity, using a wide variety of references that include mythology, popular culture, mass media, anime or the great classical painters. In his creative process, he combines a large amount of materials, like a collage.pictorial, and makes compositions in which he mixes figurative and abstract elements, creating characters that defy traditional gender norms, by combining masculine and feminine elements, evoking a sensation of ambiguity. The artist uses fashion and decoration as tools to explore self-expression. In his words “The materials reflect how I think about the construction of identity and, possibly, the code-switching from one era to another”.
Shimoyama's work has used bold representations of the complexities of race, gender, and sexuality before, dealing with these issues from different perspectives on previous occasions. For example, in her first individual exhibition, “Cry, Baby ” (2018) at The Andy Warhol Museum, where she deals metaphorically with the ritual that cutting hair implies for Afro-American culture, where barbershops adopt the role of "temple".
Shimoyama transforms this hypermasculine social space into a queer fantasy where feminine glamor and fashion take center stage. In the case of the Tarot series, the artist deals with the mystical ritual of reading cards for divinatory purposes through the reinterpretation of them, creating new myths and legends that reflect the complexity of the queer African-American experience .
Shimoyama uses for his Tarot series references from the traditional decks of the Marseille Tarot and the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot.
