Tyler Mitchell: I Can Make You Feel Good | Dreaming in Real Time

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Press Release

Tyler Mitchell
Dreaming in Real Time – 513 West 20th Street
I Can Make You Feel Good – 524 West 24th Street
September 9 – October 30, 2021

Opening reception for the exhibitions: Thursday, September 9th, from 6-8 PM at both gallery spaces.

Jack Shainman Gallery is thrilled to present two exhibitions by Tyler Mitchell at our Chelsea locations, opening Thursday, September 9th from 6-8pm. These are Mitchell’s first solo exhibitions with the gallery and continue his legacy of making images that explore the histories of intimacy and meanings of home within Black communities.

Dreaming in Real Time, on view at our 20th Street gallery, is a new series by Mitchell that visualizes scenes of peace, solitude and belonging for Black people in the pastoral American South. During the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mitchell was unable to see his family in his native state of Georgia. The distance and isolation led him to start dreaming of home. When he was able to return, he created new images of subjects in the Atlanta-metro area that consider historic and contemporary notions of refuge, repose and rootedness. 

Works such as Nap and Connective Tissue hone in on intimate moments. Two pairs of feet softly and comfortably fall into each other, siblings tenderly embrace, and children jump on mattresses, while brothers wade calmly into the riverside. Mitchell also makes multiple references to the real and lived histories of redlining within Georgia that continue to this day, which both limit the mobility of Black people and actively suppress voting rights. In Georgia Hillside (Redlining) and Chalk, Mitchell’s hand is visible through his drawn demarcations on the land. Mitchell reimagines these historically divisive lines, which have become a subconscious part of Southern life, as potential pathways of navigation, connectivity, solace and belonging. 

I Can Make You Feel Good, at our 24th Street gallery is an expansion of the body of work shown in Mitchell’s solo exhibition of the same name at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (2019) and the International Center of Photography, New York (2020). The works included in this latest iteration, exhibited publicly for the first time, continue Mitchell’s Edenic exploration of situating a Black utopia in the everyday. The large format print, Time for a New Sky, shows a young man on a rooftop gently lifting a large fabric upward, blanketing the sky. For Mitchell, the image is a representation of self-possession and Mitchell’s belief in radical optimism: the figure has the sky in his hands, he can shape new horizons.

Concurrently on view is Mitchell’s exhibition of new work at the Gordon Parks Foundation, An Imaginative Arrangement of the Things Before Me. Inspired by Gordon Parks’s photographs of Black families, Mitchell’s images are a contemporary envisioning of the Black American family through Black domestic spaces in Brooklyn, where the artist lives. Drawing on the rich interior material details found in vernacular Black family photographs, Mitchell created a new series of images and a site-specific installation that uses carpet, upholstery, antique frames and porcelain plates to imagine a modern family portrait of the African Diaspora.

Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995 Atlanta, GA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, NL, as well as the International Center of Photography, New York, NY. He has also been included in group exhibitions at the Aperture Foundation, New York, NY, and Red Hook Labs, Brooklyn, NY. He has lectured on the politics of image-making at several institutions including Harvard University, Paris Photo, and the International Center of Photography (ICP). Mitchell was awarded the 2020 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship, culminating in the exhibition mentioned above. 

Concurrently on view is Feedback, a group show curated by Helen Molesworth, at The School | Jack Shainman Gallery in Kinderhook, NY, through October 30, 2021. Upcoming exhibitions include Radcliffe Bailey at our 20th Street and 24th Street spaces opening November 4, 2021.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm. For press inquiries please contact Kate Morais, Sutton, kate@suttoncomms.com, +1 212 202 3402. For other inquiries please contact the gallery at info@jackshainman.com.