The artist applies tarot, Black diasporic religions, drag, epic fantasy world-building, and magical girl transformations to his practice.
Devan Shimoyama’s paintings, sculptures, and installations create fantastic, fictional spaces populated with figures—usually self-portraits—that share the magical qualities of the environments they inhabit. Along with personal experiences, Devan draws on a multitude of references to make his work, including classical mythology, tarot cards, drag culture, and queer iconography. Some of his works pay homage to individuals, named and unnamed, who have lost their lives to police violence. His recent immersive installation, The Grove (2021), was created in response to the disproportionate number of Black lives lost to racial violence and Covid-19 in 2020. As an imagined monument left behind in the end times of a fictitious future, the installation offers a much-needed meditative space for the processing of trauma, collective healing, and hopefulness.
Devan and I spoke this winter, following The Grove’s showing at Art Basel Miami. I quickly realized that our interests overlap in many ways: We share a respect and love for craft in all of its complex layers, including the process of making, the materials we use, where we source them from, and the social and community-based roots of the forms we choose to work with. We are also both collectors, and our artworks and materials draw attention to aesthetic histories and cultural narratives that are not often celebrated in Western art. Devan’s practice reflects the intersectionality inherent in his own biographical narrative, and his artworks portray the many facets of the self as singular, complex, and emotional—as existing in the present, but anchored by both cultural memory and a futurist imagination.
Jeffrey Gibson:
I remember when we met last time, we talked about the military, since I moved around a lot growing up because of my father’s job. Do you have an army or a military background as well?
Devan Shimoyama:
My mom was in the military for eight years in the Army National Guard. She moved around quite a bit. She had me really young, so I lived with my grandparents, and she would be in and out when she traveled for work.
JG
Were you the artist child as well?
DS
I grew up in Philly and was raised like an only child in my grandparents’ household. My aunt is only ten years older than me, and still attending grade school at the time. She was in the house a lot more than my mom. I was raised with quasi-mother figures all around me and because of that, they indulged any activity that I liked that occupied my time. I was a quiet kid, and I gravitated toward music and art. I took art classes and started playing in an orchestra when I was five or six.
JG
What instrument do you play?
DS
I played violin and viola. In high school, I was such a nerd. I was so focused on school and orchestra. I was like, really into orchestra. We traveled to Europe and played in different places. All of my extracurricular time was devoted to music.
JG
So you were a good kid?
DS
I was a good kid, yeah. (laughter)
JG
You were a good student; you went to school and did your work. That’s great. That was not me. (laughter) So has the idea of being an artist been with you for a long time?
DS
Yeah. My mother came out to me when I was about four or five. She dated someone named Charlene, who was and is an artist. They taught me a lot about drawing, and I got to learn so much from them. They’ve since transitioned and are a trans man with a wife and kids. I was really fortunate to be surrounded by queer figures my whole life; it was very normal.
JG
That’s cool. In your work, I see a mix of sensational, fictionalized spaces rooted in everyday situations. The first painting I saw of yours—an early painting—had snakes in it, jewelry eyes, and a lot of impasto paint. At the time, I couldn’t really decipher the narrative. Since then, I’ve seen you craft specific bodies of work that hold together and tell a much larger narrative in the way they are exhibited. At what point did what you do as an artist click for you?
DS
At a certain point, I decided to indulge all the things that I like and have a true interest in. I decided to have a systematic or syntactical approach to painting because I’m using so many different mediums. I needed a structure of rules and visual language and certain cues that made sense “in universe.” I think a lot in world-building terms. I treat epic fantasy as a way for me to look at and be inspired by how those worlds are built and structured, and I try to apply that to my painting practice.
JG
How would you describe this world that you’re building? If you had to create a vacation brochure for it, what happens in Devan’s world?
DS
I think a lot about the intersections of Black women at church on a Sunday, drag queens, magical girl anime, and epic fantasy—and where all that collides. I would totally make a comic book about this hybridity that occurs. Materially and with color, at least, this world is heavily inspired by that perspective. In everybody’s practice, we have to make sense out of why we’re doing something—at least to ourselves—and then eventually you keep working and working and working and using certain approaches until it becomes second nature.
The use of gradients was a decision that shifted in my practice; I originally used them to think about body temperature zones or to embody a sensation or feeling. But eventually I started to think of them as a way of depicting a divine being or a character that could be in a state of transforming, getting into drag, or changing form. I love the magical transformations that happen in high-femme anime like Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997), Sailor Moon (1993), Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), and even Power Rangers (1994). All the drama—the amorphous, intangible energy visualized—just for a character to change outfits.
The jewelry bits denote characters as magical beings as well. I want my characters to be someone anybody could project themselves into. I’m using a lot of self-portraiture, but I don’t want it to be about me specifically. I’m inventing fictitious or hybridized characters to explore archetypes and their trajectories.
JGI think you and I share a lot of similarities as artists. One similarity is our materials: their beauty and materiality, the fact that they have historically been described as surface or decorative, or as making the deeper layers of the work less penetrable. Does that make sense for your work?
DS
I’ve heard people speak about work that uses anything dazzling or sparkly or craft-related that way, and a lot of people certainly have said that to me.
JG
For sure. Those materials are very loaded and have served as a surface or mask, for better or for worse. I am thinking about your installation—The Grove at the Smithsonian—and the rhinestoning of all of those shoes and columns. How do you think about combining objects, materials, and experiences that are rooted in trauma, and then putting glitz and glamour onto it?
DS
It’s weird; I heavily associate “decorative” materials with memorialization. I think of a spontaneous memorial as DIY—people using simplistic crafting to make something beautiful and celebrate the life that was just lost. Beauty and death are often related, and memorialization is a way for people to come together and heal. When I made the hoodies that are dedicated to Trayvon Martin, people would come up to me and say, “Oh, that’s so cool” or “Oh, I’d love to wear this.” It’s always awkward. I’m like, Well, it is pretty, and I do see the fashion connection—certainly with a garment that’s dazzling—but it can also be quite loaded and heavy. That’s a complicated conversation to have with somebody. I don’t want to correct them on how they’re feeling or relating to an object.
In the following conversation, Devan Shimoyama discusses memorialization, tarot, and his desire to "make something beautiful, while still having an element that’s extreme or unique or odd or off or askew."
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