The Invert

Tops Gallery, Memphis

April–June 2017

With an opening performance featuring Terri Lynn Phillips

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Tops Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Jonathan VanDyke, the New York-based artist’s first showing in Memphis. In his paintings, sculptures, photographs, and performance, the idea of what a painting might be is reoriented and pushed into unforeseen directions. Each work is the result of intensive research and material processes developed over a decade.

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The title The Invert recalls Freud’s term for a homosexual, a now archaic reference that persisted into the 1960’s. Referring to homosexuals as “inverts” signaled that their desire was bent or literally turned over, and contributed to the idea that their bodies could be righted, or fixed, if only they were “straightened out.” In VanDyke’s work, displacement and inversion is a given: the work and the body are oriented so as to discover new possibilities for process and encounter.

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For the piece Self Portrait as My Mother, as an Actress, as a Painter, as a Stranger, presented here in a new iteration, a performer shows up at the opening with paint dripping from her purse. The paint stains her dress and slowly trickles through a manhole at street level and into Tops’ below-ground space, leaving behind a trail of color on the gallery walls and floor.