The Night Before: Poppies & Parachutes

Marc Straus is pleased to present Shaunté Gates' inaugural solo exhibition at the gallery, The Night Before: Poppies & Parachutes. Gates' first exposure to the power of visual storytelling began as a child, at his Uncle Homer's home with a continually growing video archive that spanned the history of cinema. The aesthetic of commercial Hollywood films that inspired Gates the most continues to influence his artistic practice through expansive panoramas that reveal intimate knowledge of characters. The foundation for each piece is a plank of wood, which occasionally makes an appearance among the swirl of printed media, personal photographs, drawings, tissue paper, and other materials. In almost every composition is a flock of descending parachutes that give the multidimensional tableaus a unifying and surreal leitmotif. The viewers' eye is quickly drawn to the works' figures: in the midst of tension, challenged, yet undeniably heroic. Gates' world is about competition, about succeeding and overcoming, looking to the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians to create his visual lexicon, parallel to the auteurs of Hollywood's Golden Age. A native of Washington, DC, Gates's marble statues and Ionic columns also look to the architecture of his hometown and its role in the mythologization of the United States.