Troy Lamarr Chew II

At first glance, the Slanguage series appears to be playful confetti of pop culture and simple everyday life. Bart Simpson joyously dances down the aisles of a grocery store, a Smurf snoozes on a pile of cabbage, and Sponge Bob dutifully mops the floor. For Troy Lamarr Chew II, the LA-based, SF-trained painter, these works serve as a place for pop and still life iconography to celebrate lyricism and choreography, employing hip-hop sayings and the history of dance to create compositions that vividly portray a deeper sense of how cultures present themselves. In his show this past winter at Altman Siegel in San Francisco, The Roof is On Fire, viewers could download an app to actually see, on top of the paintings, the dances that Chew was painting, the different poses where he captures his characters in motion. It was innovative and playful, but also, a psychological study of what we see and how we see art in the 21st century.
While this seems to portray Chew as some sort of digital visionary, he's much more of an Old World painter than you might presume based on this exhibition. Taking art historical narratives like still life paintings, the self-portrait, and Folk Art, Chew then takes the most contemporary and evolving language of hip-hop and its coded meanings and applies them to these overarching motifs. With a background in psychology he hypothesizes his ideas in each series, but underscores the work is a manifestation of the self as constantly evolving and exploring. The work is dense but approachable, and at heart, the dissemination of modern language through a dynamic, visually historic form.
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Evan Pricco: You grew up in LA and live there now, but your art career really started in San Francisco. Since everyone has a different opinion on the subject, what do you perceive as differences between the two?
Troy Lamarr Chew II: Well, the thing that came to my head is better weed in the Bay. That is the first thing. I'm just getting acquainted with the art world in LA. Things are opening now, but I haven't been going out too much yet because I've been painting. So I haven't really met too many art folks, though I have met art school folks, like people who go to UCLA. I don't really know the gallery people. There are just so many tiers of separation in the art world in LA, whereas, in the Bay, everybody just kicks it together. The old Bay Area person that's been known forever would be hanging out with the younger person who's coming up.
Weed and tiers! Let's move on to what I really wanted to start with, and that's your study of psychology. Given that background, give me a little bit of a breakdown of what you think is going on right now in the world right now? I promise this will lead to another question.
I don't even know if my psychological background is going to step into this one because, honestly, it's just all these money problems going on. Big world, people with money, all the stuff that we can't control as little people, money issues contaminating the whole world. That's what I feel like.
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What did you learn from psychology that helped you become a painter or helped you become an artist? I would think this would be an ideal place of study before art school.
Yes, definitely. Research is one thing, as well as experimenting. They're probably the two most important things that I took from psychology and applied to art. I approach every series like a research paper kind of thing. I have a hypothesis and shit. I don't literally write it down, but I have an idea going in. I go into it with the hypothesis, thinking, "It's doing this and then I put it out into the world and that's the test." Whatever comes back is the feedback and I can see what goes forward.
What was your hypothesis for the last show at Altman Siegel this past winter, The Roof is On Fire, and what was the feedback you received?
I thought people were going to laugh and dance because the work is already so satirical and about dancing. Using technology already adds a sense of like, "Oh, this is fun," versus a regular art show (nothing against regular art shows!). It was my first time using technology as an element of the show, letting people use the app to see the dances on top of the paintings the way we did. I thought the outcome was going to be fun. There were no somber deep thoughts within this. Even when it comes down to the color choice, it was all just bright and colorful. All good vibes, like dancing.
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Have you ever failed with your hypothesis going into a show?
Yes, and I feel sometimes that opens up more interesting things to talk about because I'll have a hypothesis that people are going to consider but then it turns into a whole other thing. When I first started this Slanguage series, I didn't think it was going to be comical because I was just like, "Oh, these are words that I hear in hip-hop." I didn't think, "Oh actually, look at the cake on the top of a donkey," because that would make you laugh. I was thinking that I would just translate what I hear. But the literal thing, the actual painting, once I started getting feedback, I understood that it is very comical to see the composition of the items. It's in the lyrics, but visualized, it's funny.
Is humor missed in hip-hop, or is it just these compositions that bring it out?
I won't call it just humor. I would call it a bunch of inside jokes that are linked to things within the culture. Or linked to beefs or linked to certain cities. There are a lot of inside jokes. Some rappers are comical, like Ludacris, who's a comical rapper; but I couldn't say Kendrick is comical. That would be so uncomfortable for me to say (laughs).
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I just watched Kendrick Lamar's headline set at Glastonbury this morning...
Oh yes. That was definitely not comical.
Not comical. Fucking amazing. Fucking brilliant. Not funny. I just thought of this now, as you were talking about the audience. Do you use the pop culture elements in your paintings as an entry point for people or do you almost use them as a sort of barrier? Because a viewer could say to themselves, "Why is Bart Simpson in this painting?" Why are these cartoon characters here in a gallery? Are you trying to get viewers to focus on the cartoon and their relationship to them in culture, or are you trying to almost throw people off with a deeper implication?
Good question. That's why I love this series so much because it's not me doing it. I don't make up the names of the dances. The only thing I do is select and pair the items. People like to look at people or things with eyes or even things with faces, so I spread them throughout the whole show. Then I combined it with the other things within the painting. It just made you want to look at it more, versus typical still lifes where it's just objects, making you have to think about composition to keep the person's eye on the canvas. This one was a little easier, but this Slanguage series is cool to me because I'm just a funnel for hip-hop to art. I don't pick anything. I pick the subject matter and then everything else is already there for me to go. I just look for what words represent what.
When I went into The Roof is On Fire, I was thinking about all the dances that were within hip-hop and the ones that I could actually have imagery for. Because I can't paint the doo-wop. I don't know if that's even a dance; there's no actual representation of a doo-wop out there. You can paint the tootsie roll. I make a list of all the dances, but also which ones kind of speak to each other, which body movements or which era the dance came out, and how I can make works that relate to one another.
Are there any historical artists that you know worked with music in this sort of way, or worked with dance in this manner?
None.
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What I like, though, is that you still, at times, work with still-lifes, so you're working within art history...
Once I understood what still life was doing, where they had a secret language, I understood that hip-hop possesses the same element. It was kind of just the light bulb popped above my head and knew I had to show the language, though not literally. You still just see what you see but if you don't get the second context of hip-hop, then you're, like, what? And if you do see it, then you start to understand more. Once you look into it, they're just like the still lifes from the old days.
Do you have recurring characters that you bring back into each painting? Do you repeat anything?
Not necessarily, unless it just adds to the composition. There are so many new words that are created every day. Even with the dances, I had to leave a lot of the new ones out because the names were too much, people just naming anything. But with all the new names and words in hip-hop and dance, this series can go on for a long time...
Simply put, you're a visual linguist.
Yes, exactly. And that's what led me to this in the first place because I look at painting as a visual language. I always just looked at it as some kind of way of telling some kind of story. And this one is literally about words versus my other series which are not so much about words, but about the language of painting.
You were in some of the paintings before.
Yes, and you can see in the portrait we shot that I'm back in some of the paintings that are in my studio now.
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