Exhibition Review: Tyler Mitchell's I Can Make You Feel Good at ICP
Tyler Mitchell: I Can Make You Feel Good
International Center of Photography
Jan 25, 2020 – May 18, 2020
Every now and then a young up-and-comer dazzles the fine-art photography world with a new, lively, and markedly individual lens. Tyler Mitchell’s solo exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP), plainly titled I Can Make You Feel Good, is meant to excite in manifold ways –– namely in the artist’s youthful success and his work’s expressively optimistic themes and substantive creation of a dreamlike imaginary.
With an aversion to being grouped into a single genre, Mitchell’s photographs and video work don’t attempt to conform to fine-art nor fashion editorial and commercial expectations. Unconcerned with defining himself as a particular type of photographer, he is invested in presenting a cohesive aesthetic and overarching thematic takeaway in his work. Mitchell’s aim to explore a new aesthetic of blackness –– one that claims power by representing black bodies in free-rein and pastime revelry –– can prove to be more potent than images of struggle and suffering that evoke an empty pity in gallery-goers hearts.
Tyler Mitchell, Boys of Walthamstow, 2018. © Tyler Mitchell
The exhibition is organized in different segments of viewing experience. A three-channel video installation, Chasing Pink, Found Red, shows a looped video of the camera panning on black models peacefully slumbering on a red and white picnic blanket. Accompanying the video work is audio recordings of young people giving testimonies of experiencing blatant and demeaning racism or colorism. These young voices reflect on the instances in which they first processed the reality of how black bodies are seen in the world. One voice disheartenedly reflects on black skin as a “bullseye for both hatred and violence.” These real-life stories, crowdsourced from the artist’s Instagram followers, add a dimension of social realism to the fictionalized, non-narrative sights in Mitchell’s lens-based work.
Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Group Hula Hoop), 2019. © Tyler Mitchell
Another video installation, Idyllic Space, positions viewers on their backs, lounging on pillows on a green turf floor in order to look at a video screen mounted on the ceiling. Showing trance-like and peaceful shots of gracefully moving black men engaging in child-like play, these slow shots of men running around, eating ice cream, and swinging in unison –– all viewed in a white-picket enclosed space in the gallery –– overtly make implications to an Arcadian, American dream. Mitchell wants us to think about this spectacle of freedom and the absence of this type of black representation in visual arts and media.
The most praised component of this exhibition is Laundry Line, an installation of Mitchell’s fashion photographs on various textiles ranging from silk to dish towels to pillowcases to floral handkerchiefs. With close-up portraits and more concealed behind-the-head shots, these fashion photographs on textiles create a new type of image in which the viewer’s survey onto these faces is mediated by the textural properties of the fabrics. While Mitchell’s photographs contain beautiful expressions of light and shadow, the fabric contributes an additional layer to how we view these images, allowing these photos to be articulated in terms of the fabric’s scale, surface texture, and translucency.
Tyler Mitchell, Untitled (Tear), 2016. © Tyler Mitchell
With a focus on legibility and inducing pleasure, Mitchell’s work feels remote from the opaque and grandiloquent messaging expected in the insulated fine-art sphere. The direct simplicity of the exhibition’s title, I Can Make You Feel Good summarizes the affective outcome Mitchell’s work aspires to generate. Almost never given context, his images live in their own luminous realm and provide shimmery glimpses of a utopian delight.
