GAYLETTER

Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon is a massive show at the New Museum. When we decamped for the opening night party it felt like every queer who makes the art world buzzy was there for a peek at the many who are contouring what we know as gender. Amidst sculptures, photographs and paintings, a delicious collage featuring vintage pornography hung on one of the gallery walls. It was by no means an in your face work, but its subtlety seemed to toy with everything Trigger is about: gender, sexuality, race, subverting the socio-political identity. Troy Michie has been working in assemblage for several years now. Having come out of grad school pursuing research-based work (the pornography and other images in his work are sourced), his first solo show up at Company Gallery Fat Cat Came to Play continues his ongoing exploration of blackness, queerness and sexuality within assemblage. While earlier works deal more explicitly with sex, his solo show takes queerness seen as a fashion and elaborates on the socio-political/socio-economic characteristics built into the Zoot Suit. Popularized by jazz musicians and typically seen worn by black men, this fashion was co-opted by butch lesbians in the 50s and has a silent queer history itself. Company exhibits several new works with sourced materials from vintage Vogue pages, to some of Michie’s own repurposed clothing. Most noteworthy is a customized zoot suit he had made by a local Texas tailor. It sits among 2017 back issues of The New York Times, beginning with Inauguration Day. Michie, who has Mexican relatives, wanted to explore labor and how that’s convoluted into daily fashion, especially in the tumultuous lens of contemporary American politics. The show nods at queerness, blue-collar labor, and how fashion — an armor of its own — has been dictating class structures since the beginning of the 20th century.  —Chris Stewart