Troy Michie

Troy Michie: My name is Troy Michie.

One of the influences with this body of work was the book by Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man.

For me it wasn't so much about coming up with a camo pattern, but thinking about visibility versus legibility.

[All] of the four works presented are composed of multiple magazine pages that have been woven. So from like, half an inch, an inch, to two inch, and that just forms the substrate.

The magazines are sourced from niche pornographic magazines from the seventies and eighties only depicting men of color.

Part of that reasoning was that I was thinking a lot about just how bodies are portrayed in pornography often as fetish objects and I kind of wanted to, dematerialize the forms.

I grew up in El Paso, Texas which was my hometown. I went to undergrad there. So around the time of the election, it was important for me to try to make a body of work that really brought border communities to the forefront, with just all the misconceptions that were being said like hate speech.

In these compositions there's always a horizontal line, whether it's a belt or the top of a pair of pants. So I am thinking about line, whether it's horizontal or vertical, as an actual border or boundary.