Born in 1990, Jake Troyli is an American artist who lives and works in Chicago. He received his BFA from Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, TN (2013), MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa (2019), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME (2019). He has been awarded a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship for the 2019-2020 season, was an ACRE resident in Steuben, WI (2018), and received the Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Grant, Largo, FL (2017). His work is in the permanent collection of The Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL and The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas.
“My work deals with (mis)representation, performance, otherness, and the construction of identity. By using my own form as a sort of elastic avatar, and appropriating motifs from both the classical and the comic, my paintings exist in a space that defies and subverts immediate assumptions. Instead, I utilize self-conscious self-imagery and familiar language to navigate tense conversations with my viewer, and with myself. Through the presence of prop-like iconography and compositions reminiscent of community theater sets, I position my figures as performing commodities constantly on display. Merely spectacles for the audience to enjoy, each figure attempts to establish and perform their given narrative in a way that is just convincing enough to earn the audience’s admiration, with symbols of performance anxiety and vulnerability embedded within each work. While much of my recent work has been produced at a time when the black body is at the height of socio-political discord, the paintings are not necessarily in response to the current unrest, but to an eternal debate surrounding the commodification of blackness. What does it mean to be hyper-visible? And how easily does the line between subject and object start to blur?”
— Jake Troyli