McClain Gallery is excited to announce our first solo exhibition with multi-disciplinary artist Shikeith (b. 1989, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). This show, part of our two presentations for FotoFest 2022, includes recent photographs and small-scale sculptures and marks the premiere of three new prints.

Shikeith’s work, conceptual at its core, explores the experiences of Black queer men via portraiture. The artist develops a visual vocabulary by sieving personal and cultural history. Hauntings, psychic space, intimacy, and the refusal of painful societal expectations all have seats at the table of his practice. His material choices mirror his investment in the non-corporeal: skin, sweat, clay, “haint” blue, and breath become physical manifestations and symbols for the themes Shikeith deftly navigates.

Through eerie compositions and the distillation of color, Shikeith pinpoints his interest in how the past tints our current experiences and can engender a stillness and potency. His new monograph, Notes Towards Becoming a Spill, features a collection of found photographs, an extension of the artist’s exploration of portraiture. Says Shikeith, “the found photographs [...] are part of my archive focused on establishing and critically fabulating the missing gaps within Black gay history. I select the pictures with a knowing and wonder regarding the subjects’ lives.” In Shikeith’s practice, collecting and looking at a group of portraits – establishing an archive – is a paramount act in restoring agency to a body oppressed. Revisiting the past, critically, is folded into the practice of hauntology.

Shikeith’s photographs and sculptures evoke such presences and resurrections through familiar iconography. The classical recline of Visiting Hours, 2022 deliberately recalls a resurrection scene. A figure sheathed in a white bedsheet wraps itself around a sleeping person and, like the childhood game of dressing up as a ghost, the cloaked figure appears as a specter from the past. The hazy, gray tone of expired film imbues the image with sensitive intimacy. The sleeping person is ‘visited,’ as it were, by a gentle ghost, one who holds and caresses him. The image was made during a time of grief and satisfies a deep longing for closeness. 

Shikeith focuses on a malleable, free state of being that he aspires to for himself and his subjects. Three blown glass sculptures make use of the artist’s breath, a gesture that illustrates his approach to his role as a maker, much like the intimacy with his sitters. Through the repetition of specific shapes throughout his oeuvre – the glass balloon, the ceramic deathmask-like object, the use of the color blue – Shikeith emphasizes moments that have a fleeting existence but such a heavy psychic one: breath, expiration, lightness, illusion, imagination.  

We are grateful to Yossi Milo Gallery for their collaboration on this exhibition, and Shikeith's generosity and kindness through this process.