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Manny (In Posession), 2020Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to present an overview of works by interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker Shikeith. Ceremonies, titled after Essex Hemphill’s renowned collection of poetry, features new photographs, sculptures and video works, highlighting the range of the artist’s image-based, conceptual practice exploring boundless visualizations of Black masculinity and inspiring dialogue about history and the potential of change. Shikeith’s premiere exhibition at the gallery is planned for 2021.
In Ceremonies, Shikeith envisions portraiture as an extended place of performance and reconciliation in the constitutive process of becoming. Mingling euphoria and magical arcana, Shikeith converts histories of Black ancestral healing into a unique, supernatural aesthetic of defiance. His Notes Towards Becoming A Spill series presents photographs of Black male bodies that lean into the uncanny. Taking possession of the camera as a tool of reinvention, Shikeith visualizes a ritual process of excavating Black men's erotic potential so that they can rid themselves of intangible presences that haunt their bodies and psyches. Within the setting of a black frame, there is an ecstatic occurrence arising inside each person, with a full range of psychological states evoked, such as ecstasy, desire, euphoria and fear. Seen in these active states of sweating, licking, conjuring, disintegrating, thinking, quickening, cumming, believing, screaming, shifting, longing, and exhaling, a focus is placed on wetness as a way to suggest flow—not only the body seated before the camera, but the process from youth to adulthood of psychological and moral growth. Sweat also becomes the metaphor for an inner yearning that rises to the facade of the flesh, an announcement of various kinds of histories.
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Prince, 2019
Exemplary of Shikeith’s approach using fantasy and mysticism to disrupt the ways bodies have been represented, the photograph O' my body, make of me always a man who questions!, 2020 can be considered simultaneously as an evocation of reconciliation that is rooted in a black ancestral remedy, as well as a knowing allegory about the “magical” abilities of artists. Two pairs of hands motion over a sweat-beaded torso, suggesting a ceremonial laying on of hands that accompanies the conferring of a blessing or authority, or signifies an ordination or spiritual healing. The artist-magician exorcises historic constructions of Black male identity that emerged during and in the aftermath of American chattel slavery. “There’s a long history of the camera and the materials attached being complicit in the constructions of what we know a black man to be,” says Shikeith. “A lot of my photography is about destroying those tropes.”
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Hunter, 2019
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Feeling The Spirit, 2020
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Now I lay me down to sleep, 2020
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O' my body, make of me always a man who questions!, 2020
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to bathe a mirror, 2018
five-channel video installation, audio, 18:50'to bathe a mirror' is an act, an unraveling that perspires, breaks, and spills. It's 2 am Saturday night down at the basement party and 7 am Sunday morning up in the pews of a Black church. -
Shikeith's solo exhibition Feeling the Spirit in the Dark at The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh, PA, is on view through March 2021. His work has recently been featured in institutional solo exhibitions, including the Alexander Brest Museum & Gallery, Jacksonville University, Jacksonville, FL; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; and Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA. He received his MFA in Sculpture from The Yale School of Art, after earning his BA in Integrative Arts from The Pennsylvania State University. In 2019, Shikeith received a Painters & Sculptors Grant from The Joan Mitchell Foundation. This year he was awarded the 2020 Art Matters Foundation Grant and was selected for the 2020 – 2021 Leslie Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship. He was born in 1989 in Philadelphia, PA, and currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA.
