Hank Willis Thomas is selling something. This is clearly evidenced in the works included in Pitch Blackness, his second solo exhibition currently on view at Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea. Thomas, who is well versed in undermining the loaded visual language of the advertising media–think Air Jordan meets the Hottentot Venus–relies here once again on visual trickery and deftly executed slight of hand in distilling key iconic media imagery.

Thomas is at his strongest in rendering works that not only conflate, but also leave room for interpretation. Absolut No Return, (2008) a digital photographic manipulation, skillfully invokes the iconic Vodka ad campaign by marrying the all-too-familiar spirits bottle silhouette with a photograph that invokes, perhaps, the solemn first-person view of an African American slave peering out of the window of a crumbling “port factory” – a way station for slaves before their forced exodus on the Middle Passage to the New World. At the same time, the seascape pictured offers an ironic riff on the all too familiar “Come to Jamaica and Feel All Right!” suite of ads.

Christopher Sims: I Am A Man, 2008, Liquitex on canvas

I Am A Man, (2008), a seductive suite of twenty works on canvas, pays homage to Ernest C. Withers’ photograph of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A strong case for the power of reductive minimalism, scaling back the psychological distance between the minority consumer and luxury products, the work ingeniously expands the scope of the “I AM A MAN” placards carried by the strikers by reordering the text to read, “I AM THE MAN”, “AM I A MAN” and ultimately “I AM HUMAN”.

As is the case with most sophisticated forms of media outreach, I prefer to feel as if I am somehow involved in the process (that I’m in on the secret). It is only when Thomas leaves room for the viewer to enter the work that he succeeds in hitting his target demographic.

Hank Willis Thomas has exhibited his work nationally at venues such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. He was included in the recent exhibition, “After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy”, at the High Museum, Atlanta, GA; in Frequency at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2005; and in the 2006 California Biennial at The Orange County Museum of Art. His work is featured in several public collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the International Center of Photography in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

“…Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion – but a necessary illusion if we are to love!” -from Balthazar, by Lawrence Durrell.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya‘s ALEXANDRIA, a photographic installation currently on view at The Envoy Gallery on the Lower East Side, references the literature of expatriate British novelist, poet and dramatist Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990). Specifically, the installation is titled after the Alexandria Quartet (1957 – 1961), a work of literature set in pre-WWII Alexandria, Egypt, which tells the tale of Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, and their romantic relationships with Durrell’s tragic artist, Darley. Each book in the Quartet presents one of four takes on a single love story, essentially the same tale told from different relativistic perspectives.

On view at Envoy, interspersed among crisply enlarged photographs of pages from the 1961 Penguin Edition of Durrell’s Quartet, are abstracted photographs collectively titled Portrait that refused to be taken (2007), an intimate grouping which hints at the transient nature of the photographic portrait. The predominantly white photographs reveal furtive glimpses of limbs and faces, blurred streaks across the surface of the photos that are reminiscent of Serrano’s spectral Ejaculate in Trajectory series (1989). In referencing such an esoteric piece of literature by Durrell, whose own discontent with the inherent narrative function of the novel is paramount, Sepuya’s artistic admixture is certainly fitting.

While in the past, Sepuya has been cast as an “uber-contemporary” seeker of love, lost within the cold confines of various internet hook-up sites (think manhunt.net) and a bare and white-walled urban apartment, here he makes a broad and informed leap toward a point of poetic equilibrium; an understanding of the subject-object synergy, partnered with the mature realization that certain universal truths are never to be revealed. In so doing, he reminds us that our own personal narratives, as well as our own continual search for love, are never as they seem and can never truly be known.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied photography and imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Sepuya has participated in group exhibitions at Envoy Gallery, Daniel Reich Gallery, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, STUX Gallery, Artists Space and the Powerhouse Arena in New York City; the Australian Center of Photography, Sydney, Australia, and Art Metropole, Toronto. His first solo exhibition, Beloved Object and Amorous Subject, was presented at Envoy Gallery in the Spring of 2007. Features of Sepuya’s work can be found in BUTT, EYEMAZING, TSHDT?, Capricious, and I.D., and The New York Times. He is the publisher of the well-known zine project, SHOOT.