Jake Troyli Collision Course
Front cover: The Jousters, 2023 (detail)
Back cover: The Welcome Wagon, 2024 (detail)
Jake Troyli Collision Course
Monique Meloche Gallery
November 9, 2024 - January 11, 2025
Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker Essay by Joy Priest Edited by Staci Boris
Photographed by Bob. Designed by Julia Marks
This catalogue was published on the occasion of Collision Course, a solo exhibtion at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago
©2024
Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker
moniquemeloche is pleased to present Jake Troyli: Collision Course, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Taking cues from the technical and compositional elements of Northern Renaissance paintings, Troyli’s self-portraiture fuses comic language with social critique as he explores the performance of identity and the commodification of the Black/Brown body. Collision Course centralizes the artist’s ongoing investigations within a larger context of the battle, posing questions around the spectacle through micro and macro examinations of conflict.
This new series was initiated during a year-long residency as an inaugural Visual Artist Fellow at the Académie des beaux-arts x Cité Internationale des arts program in Paris, France. During this time abroad, Troyli became heavily inspired by the compositions of epic battle and martyr paintings present throughout European museums. In a timely presentation, the works in Collision Course subvert humanity’s fixation on conflict and the need to create narratives based on heroism and villainy to define ourselves. This notion of code-switching has been a central theme within the artist’s practice, rendered through the steady use of his own avatar engaged in constant cycles of performance. Collision Course presents an expanded cast of characters and symbols to extend further beyond the self-portrait, complicating this hero-villain dynamic and the elasticity of these roles, whereby the figures function as both subject and sacrifice.
Grounding the exhibition, a two-part painting analogous to a theatrical backdrop provides a plethora of choreographed chaos. Multiple “Troyli” figures appear manifold–engaged in a congressional assembly hall, rejoicing in church, protesting near a tent community, manufacturing AR-15 rifles blindfolded, serving champagne at a private Dior party, or voting on whether Kendrick or Drake won, while new figures donning “Troyli” masks complicate our ability to discern which role is being played. These figures are both police and policed, shooter and target, leader and follower, persecutor and persecuted.
Part combative, part cannibalistic, the figures are defined by their opposition. Across moments of martyring throughout the show, questions around what it means to self-mythologize and self-valorize come to light. While we are unsure what is being fought for, it becomes more important that they are fighting. This perpetual collision course speaks to the anxiety of it all. Upon entering the gallery, viewers are greeted by a singular “Troyli”, nude and exhausted blowing on a bugle, as if to say he’s doing this for the thousandth time. Nearby, multiple “Troylis” are engaged in battle on horseback. Apathetic expressions abound, we wonder who is really at war as our eyes greet the mad gaze of two horses in an enraged clash. Warhorses, and the bugler for that matter, become metaphors for participants in this never-ending confrontation who are neither actively involved nor invested, but whose lives are nevertheless on the line. This idea of impassivity or complicit participation echoes throughout, as we see that no matter which role they’re playing, all the figures in the compositions are in their own way implicated in the Orwellian unending battle at the center of the show.
Collision Course: Six Vignettes
By Joy Priest
Collision
When I step through the black, industrial doors of Monique Meloche Gallery on Paulina St., the first thing I see in Jake Troyli’s latest solo show, Collision Course, is Jake with a bugle to his lips. As always, he is naked. His expression, resigned. His Afro, larger than the frame. This piece, Another Call to Arms (2024), is the smallest painting in the show, and the last piece he finished, but it is undoubtedly the beginning.
The show’s curation is narrative and surreal. Monique tells me that it was mostly Jake’s vision aside from one edit she made to move Another Call to Arms a few inches off-center. Off-center is how everything feels during the show’s opening on Saturday, Nov. 9, four days after the recent presidential election. Troyli mentions several times that the show is imbued with a more intense context. Standing in the middle of these pieces—and what feels like an eight-year boomerang of déjà vu—is like standing inside a slow-motion implosion whose human detritus has yet to collide. We’re all tilted slightly, spinning around time’s historical axis, wobbly and plotted somewhere between oblivious and weary, like the faces of the Jakes.
Jake Troyli, Another Call to Arms, 2024
The Bugler’s eyes are indifferent, dead. There is a fatigue, an emotional depletion brought on by the repetitive duty to warn. He performs the call to arms over and over, and nothing changes. He is trapped inside a recursive prison, governed by the sound and choreography of war. Bugler-Jake reminds me of Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” which Benjamin introduces in his essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in 1940, the year he committed suicide to avoid capture by the Nazis. In the ninth thesis, Benjamin describes the figure in Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920):
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call Progress.
It is Benjamin’s description, rather than Klee’s painting, that Troyli’s bugler calls to mind. Like the Bugler, the Angel would like to animate the dead (read: the unconscious and indifferent) and stop the storm’s wreckage. Benjamin’s warning about how we perceive history and its unfortunate events—as relegated to the past and anachronistic when they emerge in the present—is also relevant here. This understanding of time results in our conscription into spectacle, performance, and automatism, via a repeated shock or disbelief at regressive sociopolitical events in place of a real redress. Rather than actually cleaning up the wreckage, we simply leave it behind, calling this progress. Interestingly, Troyli paints Bugler-Jake (and all his avatars) with what he describes as “a suspension of disbelief” at the violence and absurdity in the scenes he paints. Perhaps, these facial expressions represent a refusal to participate in the collective shortterm memory, or perhaps they represent the exhaustion brought on by the Black artist’s role to warn.
Both central figures in Klee’s and Troyli’s paintings are wearied by the accumulation of failed attempts to intervene and effect meaningful change. Eventually, both capitulate to the forces of spectacle, and their duties become mechanical, habitual repetition. Rote bugling and passive spectatorship. Carried away, rather than flying. Yet, even in a state of paralysis they herald: a collision is imminent.
Course
If you were to somehow miss Another Call to Arms, and see, first, one of the other two paintings in the entry room, you would be thrown into the action, in media res, like any well-told story. The larger piece on the center wall, The Welcome Wagon (2024), depicts five identical men in a red Ford pickup flying an American flag. One of them releases a white dove into a cobalt blue sky, Troyli’s signature backdrop. Where are they going? This band heads due West, towards the bugler on the left wall. The quince-duplicated man is a new, nameless character in Troyli’s artificial universe. He belongs to the pink-toned, presumably white cadre of characters, rather than the brown-toned, yellowbone Jake avatars.
The other painting in this room, The Jousters (2023), features three Jakes on horseback. They ride across a valley with dumbfounded expressions and candy-striped lances, which they hold at an angle to the horses’ heads such that they appear to be unicorns. These Jakes rock medieval chest armor and skinny flat tops that mirror their lances, so high that they extend beyond the top of the canvas. While the jousters seem totally detached from the battle they’re riding toward, their horses show teeth and bear forth with a singular aim, galloping in the direction of The Welcome Wagon on the middle wall. In both paintings, the lines create movement toward the left of the frame: the direction of the truck,
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, “Dancing in an Enclosure: Activism and Mourning in the Puerto Rican Summer of 2019” Small Axe 26, no. 2 (2022): 23.
José Esteban Muñoz, “The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep,” in After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 142.
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (New York: Routledge, 2007), 95.
Jake Troyli, The Welcome Wagon, 2024
the men’s arms (one capped by a finger-gun), and the jousters’ lances all aim west. It’s as if the truck full of patriots are racing toward the bugler in Another Call to Arms, and the jousters make chase.
“They’re running into each other,” Troyli says. He could be talking about the arrangement of the paintings or the figures in them. The first room’s curation produces a battle triptych, which suggests a recurring historical moment—no matter where you look first, you are called back, along with the figures in the paintings, to the bugle sounding, yet another collision of societal archetypes.
Collision
Troyli began the works in this show during a residency in Paris, and he cites Northern Renaissance paintings, as well as the battle and martyr scenes that he encountered in European museums, as inspiration for this series. He also mentions the painting American People Series #20: Die by the Black American painter Faith Ringgold, who just passed this past April. Like the title piece in Collision Course, it is a two-panel oil on canvas. Painted in 1967 in response to the racial uprisings in America’s major cities, Die captures the action of a bloody fray in which people across race and social class are fighting.
“Figures are killing and running from each other, there’s panic and fear,” Troyli says. “They’re locked into it together. I think that is part of the wallpaper of our lives.” I’m struck by his surreal description of various members of society, and the social archetypes they represent, being trapped together in this wallpaper of conflict. This makes me think of another Ringgold painting from the American People series: #18: The Flag is Bleeding, also painted in 1967. In this one, three people—a white man, a white woman, and a Black man—are quite literally locked (they lock arms) into the fabric of the American flag. This wallpaper metaphor speaks to the tensions suppressed beneath the surface of our quotidian lives, ready to erupt at any moment into a conflict, into which we are conscripted. Some of us are horn players, some of us are jousters, and some of us are riling the mob.
2 José Esteban Muñoz, “The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep,” in After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 142.
3 Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (New York: Routledge, 2007), 95.
“Yeah, this series is really about conflict,” Troyli says. “There’s always this conflict in the periphery . . . something is always lurking.” Troyli isn’t interested, however, in reproducing the antinomies of good and evil or being didactic. He describes and depicts the scene of collision from all perspectives.
Jake Troyli, The Jousters, 2023
Course
As a writer, I know something about constructing worlds from nothing, which is what Troyli has done across his first three solo shows. This world is made up of a set of tensions. Power and vulnerability. Armor and nakedness. The unsettling amidst the idyllic. The opposition against the self. Like Benjamin’s Angel of History, the Jake-avatars that labor in this world are propelled around by the insidious force of progress.
As I enter the second room of the gallery, I am immediately drawn to Collision Course (2024), the multi-scene title piece on the center wall. It is the largest piece Troyli has ever done at around 6 x 12 feet. In each of Troyli’s shows you’ll find one of these mammoth works from which the other mid-sized pieces in the show are pulled as vignettes. These are my favorite pieces. I stand and stare at them forever, leaving reality and entering Troyli’s surreal world. The longer I look the more crafted easter eggs reveal themselves to me—an experience I usually only have when reading a poem. In this latest work I count around 20 scenes or vignettes, but so much is happening simultaneously, it’s hard to quantify. In the middle of the painting, a battle ensues—miniature Jakes with flat tops shaped like a Badu headdress, behead, shoot, spear, and kidnap other Jakes. All of the painting’s scenes happen against the backdrop of immaculate weather and a perfectly manicured landscape.
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, “Dancing in an Enclosure: Activism and Mourning in the Puerto Rican Summer of 2019” Small Axe 26, no. 2 (2022): 23. José Esteban Muñoz, “The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep,” in After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 142.
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (New York: Routledge, 2007), 95.
“It’s a little too utopian, too idyllic, too nice,” Troyli says when I ask him about his eerily perfect world. “I’ve chopped the tops off the buildings, so you have access to everything.” The effect is a voyeuristic vantage from outside. Looking into these multi-scene works is like looking down into the architectural model of a city. In these huge blueprints, the Jake figures are manufactured,
Jake Troyli, Collision Course, 2024
Jake Troyli, Collision Course, 2024, (detail)
like conscripted clones in a dystopian world of progress and efficiency, posed in neat, single-file lines and geometrical formations. Personalities come off the assembly line.
“I want them to feel kind of like dolls,” he says. “The stiffness is indicative of a sort of staging . . . The posing. This is the posing that I have to hold. This is the performance that I have to do.” This menacing utopia is a projection of life-sized Jake’s real-world experiences. Here on the canvas, however, he is in control.
“The figures exist in a weird ether space, they’re not fully realized. They meld and emerge from the architecture.” Indeed, the self, and its many iterations, dissolves and emerges from the wallpaper of these scenes.
Troyli’s figuration implicates the self in performance and spectacle, whether that’s being a symbol of progress, working to sustain an audience as an artist of color in the industry, or “the tension of constantly working for applause,” as Troyli puts it. Self-interrogation is the catalyst behind his mode of self-portraiture. In one photo of Troyli in his studio, one can see two Jakes locking lips in a drawing hanging above his workstation. Above the self-lovers, the word NARCISSISM floats in big, block letters.
“I drew that in school,” he says, “because I was starting to use the self-portrait. I’m always going to criticize myself first. No one wants to be introspective, and no one wants to be self-reflective. It’s always someone else who is bad.”
Artist sketch, courtesy of Jake Troyli, 2024
In this critique, I hear a statement on what it takes to be an artist worth his salt—namely intimacy with oneself and an ability to confront the least flattering things.
Thinking of Jake as a narcissist is very unserious, kind of like Jake at times. During our fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in 2019, we hit it off. He complimented my film that I’d screened for our introductory show-and-tell, then we found a basketball court and bonded over big-little pick-and-rolls, being Black/ biracial and from the South, and finger-drawn snow portraits of his signature crested eyebrows. It’s hard to imagine this guy taking himself seriously enough to be a narcissist. His wife, Jenna, is a twin spirit. They’re wacky characters, tricking friends into drinking Malört, stealing each other’s place cards at fancy art dinners, and posing next to Troyli’s paintings with loopy faces identical to his avatars. The zaniness is contagious. To be around the Troylis is to be energized, not drained. And this is the vibe of the work and its factory of self-image. As I stand in the show’s second room, the Jakes proliferate and so does the generosity of Troyli’s humor, genius, and insight into himself and, as a result, us.
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, “Dancing in an Enclosure: Activism and Mourning in the Puerto Rican Summer of 2019” Small Axe 26, no. 2 (2022): 23.
Collision
José Esteban Muñoz, “The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep,” in After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 142.
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (New York: Routledge, 2007), 95.
At some point, I start to track the different Jakes across the six paintings by their hairstyles. I’m curious as to whether the hairstyles indicate something about the different Jakes. In Sunday Best for the Martyring (2024), there are three pink-
toned male figures who could be that same new character in The Welcome Wagon, but here their hair is more coiffed, and they are wearing suits rather than camouflage shirts, white tees, and Tom Brady’s #12 Patriots jersey. There are also three Jakes. Two are naked and wear the towering high top of the jousters: one, the martyr, is strapped down to some sort of torture device being roasted over flames, and the other holds his hand in a ridiculous and futile gesture of support.
A third Jake sports an Afro like Bugler-Jake and his purple Sunday-best suit, while smugly shaking one of the other suit’s hands.That this could be Bugler-Jake selling himself out, crosses my mind.
The inevitable collision occurs in Into the Fray (2024). Though three Jakes in this painting have the tall high tops of the jousters, they are missing the chest plates, and instead of candy-striped weapons that are shaped like safety cones, they wield swords and traditional wooden lances. One jouster on a white horse meets a jouster on a brown horse. Their faces reflect a marked apathy. A third Jake appears between them, bewildered and wide-eyed. His mouth is hidden by one of the others’ swords, effectively silenced, which begs a curiosity
Jake Troyli, Sunday Best for the Martyring, 2024
as to what this Jake is looking at or reacting to and might be trying to warn us about. On the ground between the clashing jousters, beneath the rump of a Black horse, one of Troyli’s recurring white, male characters holds a sword to the throat of a fourth Jake, who lies on his back beneath the fray. This murderous figure resembles the bald “Superfan” from Troyli’s previous show Slow Clap (2022). Displays of ownership over the Jakes’s Black bodies reverberate between the figure here and his instantiation in the previous show, where his limbs wrap a Jake’s body like rope. I believe this final Jake, with a blade to his throat, to be Bugler-Jake—he is distinct from the other three in the painting because of his globular Afro.
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, “Dancing in an Enclosure: Activism and Mourning in the Puerto Rican Summer of 2019” Small Axe 26, no. 2 (2022): 23.
José Esteban Muñoz, “The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep,” in After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 142.
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (New York: Routledge, 2007), 95.
Jake Troyli, Into the Fray, 2024, (detail)
Course
The absurdity in Troyli’s paintings reminds me of the first time I drove through central Florida on my way to Tampa. A hot pink shack on stilts. Bedazzled boats. Roadside alligator nuggets and psychics on billboards. Florida weird. It is a place imbued with strange magic and saturated color, a place Troyli claims as home. Its image system and atmosphere clearly vibrate in the world of his works.
So does the existential surrealism of being Black and from the South, being biracial and in-between, being aberrantly and absurdly tall, or “Coming from the mud!” as we both exclaimed at the bar ahead of the show’s opening— these are all experiences that can feel a bit unreal. Troyli tells me that people draw connections between his work and Magritte’s a lot, but I also pick up on a specifically Black surrealism that comes about from living in someone else’s fiction—the resigned expressions in the face of performative progress, the discordant images, the speculative enmeshment of the figures with their surroundings—that wallpaper Black artists are trapped in. Troyli paints himself in and out of it.
Jake Troyli, Into the Fray, 2024, (detail)
Installation Views
Artworks
Another Call to Arms, 2024 oil on canvas
16 x 20 in 40.6 x 50.8 cm
The Welcome Wagon, 2024 oil on canvas
64 x 96 in 162.6 x 243.8 cm
The Jousters, 2023 oil on canvas
48 x 60 in 121.9 x 152.4 cm
Sunday Best for the Martyring, 2024 oil on canvas
72 x 48 in 121.9 x 152.4 cm
188
Collision Course, 2024 oil on canvas
74 x 148 in (total)
x 375.9 cm
Into the Fray, 2024 oil on canvas
72 x 72 in 182.9 x 182.9 cm
Jake Troyli (b.1990, Boston, MA) played Division 1 basketball at Presbyterian College, Clinton, SC before receiving his BFA from Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, TN (2013), and his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa (2019). He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME in 2019. Solo exhibitions include moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2024/2022/2020); Tempus Projects, Tampa, FL (2018); and ArtsXchange, Atlanta, GA (2018). Troyli’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at Perrotin Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Galerie Droste, Düsseldorf, DE (2024) and Paris, FR (2021); Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI (2023-24); Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY (2023); The Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL (2021); Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL (2019); and San Francisco Art Institute, CA (2018). Troyli’s work is included in the group exhibition Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, curated by Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Seph Rodney, and Katy Siegel, at SFMoMA, which travels to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Pérez Art Museum Miami and will be accompanied by a scholarly publication. His work is in the permanent collections of the Tampa Art Museum, Tampa, FL; the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; and Pierce and Hill Harper Arts Foundation, Detroit, MI. He is the recipient of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2019-2020) and the Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Grant, Largo, FL (2017). Troyli was a 2023 Visual Artist recipient of the Academy of Fine Arts x International City of Arts program in Paris, France. He is a current resident at Project for Empty Space in Newark, NJ.
Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (2020, Pitt Poetry Series), selected as the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets’ Anthology (2023, Sarabande). She received her BA in Print Journalism from the University of Kentucky (2012), her MFA in Poetry from the University of South Carolina (2019), and her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston (2024). She has been awarded a National Endowments for the Arts Fellowship (2021), a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2019-2020), and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review (2020). Her poems and essays have appeared widely in publications such as the Boston Review, Gulf Coast, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and ESPN, and in commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She is currently an Assistant Professor of African American / African Diasporic Poetry & Poetics and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice for the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP) at the University of Pittsburgh.
Exhibition Checklist
Another Call to Arms, 2024 oil on canvas
16 x 20 in 40.6 x 50.8 cm
The Welcome Wagon, 2024 oil on canvas
64 x 96 in 162.6 x 243.8 cm
The Jousters, 2023 oil on canvas
48 x 60 in 121.9 x 152.4 cm
Sunday Best for the Martyring, 2024 oil on canvas
72 x 48 in 121.9 x 152.4 cm
Collision Course, 2024 oil on canvas
74 x 148 in (total)
188 x 375.9 cm
Into the Fray, 2024 oil on canvas
72 x 72 in
182.9 x 182.9 cm
Additional Image Credit: pg. 22 Artist sketch courtesy of Jake Troyli
Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622 For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com
