Tylonn J. Sawyer is an American figurative artist, educator, and curator living and working in Detroit. He is an activist, rooted in his community and invested in Detroit’s young people. His work explores identity, contemplative but deliberate, making his mark, “Ty was Here.” He questions what constitutes identity and then re-constitutes it, a different order, parsing apart politics, race, history, and pop culture in the ongoing conundrum. The self-made protagonists in his deft drawings, paintings, and murals shape-shift across continents, time, generations, using masks of his ancestors and mentors like Malcolm X and Barack Obama (DNA, 2019) in overlay, mapping his own journey towards self-determination with their guidance. Often shown in multiple, Sawyer’s suited figures splice, as if a metaphor for double and triple consciousness.
For WHITE HISTORY MONTH VOL.I, Sawyer takes on the visual vernacular often associated with power and oppression in Western art. The larger-than-life statuary figures in his jumbo size drawings (Strata Drawings I and II, 2019) accentuate the puffed up Euro-centric masculinity pervasive in classical sculpture and later post-Civil War Confederate monuments, bringing both into question.
VOL.II, The title “Year of the Flood” from Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name, which a virus ravages the earth and changes the way man has to survive. The arrival of the corona virus in the US and its disruption of the day to day workings of our society has overwhelmed my artistic focus and forced me to create more intuitively rather than a rigorous plan I’m accustomed to. Culling from Western history and cultural tropes, the work in this exhibition centers on distortions in America’s social fabric. Over the last several years the traditional American image of righteous patriotism, main street, white picket fences, apple pie and Fourth of July fireworks have been replaced by overt xenophobia heralded by those highest in office. Televised lynchings of black men at the hands (or knee) of police officers, and social unrest in the midst of the increasing wealth gap are just a couple of the issues that have underpinned America’s crumbling reputation as the land of milk and honey.
