Allston Skirt Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of work by New York-based painter Tony Gray, whose images of statuesque Black Fairies and seductive, hybrid Mermaids and Mermen mix past and present, paper and paint as Gray continues his ongoing exploration of constructed visions of history, reality, and identity. The Fairies, with their long legs, wild hairdos and outfits straight out of Vogue Magazine, circa 1972, occupy a netherworldly environment, posing with outsized flora, and being shadowed by undersized, darkly painted humans lurking at the margins. The mystery of these works tweaks at our conscience and our conscious, as political pointedness and visual pleasure conspire to draw us in. Cultural critic bell hooks has written: "[Gray] conjures up visions that rely on the ethereal to disrupt any fixed notions of what we may think black identify is. In the space of the imaginary, blackness is as fluid a category as any other, even as it is grounded in a concrete history.... His Black Fairy blends notions of good and evil, daring us to move beyond simplistic concepts of black identify, of a dark unconscious world constructed as harsh and brutal, to one where there is innocence and opaqueness. In this imaginary world Gray resurrects a primal paradise where blackness is the site of a seduction that is elusive, tender, and fluid. But this does not mean he forgoes creating art that rigorously questions our notions of race and gender."

Gray's work has recently been exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and at Debs & Co. Gallery in New York. He has been awarded fellowships at The MacDowell Colony and at Skowhegan School of Paintings and Sculpture. We are pleased to present his first one-person exhibition in Boston.
In our project room, we are presenting Karolyn Hatton's installation "Wild Thing", for which the artist has embroidered landscapes on tee shirts and sculpted birds out of duct tape to create a 3-D contemporary pastoral with wit and bite. Hatton writes: "Using low tech, easily found materials, I transform them through slight twists and turns. Nothing too virtuoso, it is more like small collisions of disparate elements. These may point to beauty or nature, but the objects retain the mundaneness still present in the pedestrian materials... Crows made from duct tape and plastic bags have newsprint eyes (Condoleeza Rice, Claudia Schiffer, and other major and minor celebs), and together they become a mob of churlish skeptics, moving around the exhibition space eyeing each other and the artwork. The T-shirts are "tapestries‚ for a contemporary world; I have embroidered pastoral scenes over their wrestling, car racing, and strip club motifs -- motifs of escape and desire. The idealized landscape suggests a longing for an impossible eden, naive and pure. But then we're always brought back to the racetrack."