Troy cuts found black-and-white images of the highly racialized zoot suit (first made popular in 1940s Harlem) into mesmerizing collages. I’m always thinking about those dynamics in my work.” For his latest works, Troy turned to his memories of growing up in El Paso to dissect race. “Like discrimination against women in all-male spaces and discrimination against trans people. “When I was around 22, I was just thinking ‘Oh, great, I’m finally free,’ but then I realized there was a whole other dynamic happening,” the Yale MFA graduate elaborates with. Troy says it took awhile for him to develop a critical relationship with gender and sexuality. “Society tries to simplify gender and sexuality and collage is about breaking those frameworks apart. “I think collage is an amazing medium to approach these kind of issues,” Troy tells i-D. It’s a blatant curbing of the idolization the queer male community has towards traditionally “masculine,” athletic bodies. The parts of the model we want to see most are the parts Troy hides. Troy masterfully turns a collage of a nude, buff male into a tantilizating game of hide-and-seek for viewers. The collages the New York-based artist showed at the New Museum’s Trigger: Gender as a Tool and Weapon exhibition last fall stressed how, sometimes, the most romanticized visuals in queer culture can be the most damaging. These bittersweet images inspired some of Troy Michie’s first collages.
Need proof? Pick up a vintage gay porn magazine and you’ll find fetishized images of nude black and brown men that simultaneously exalt their physical qualities and silence their identities.