A Night at the Sock Hop
In every installment of The Artists, T highlights a current or little-shown work by a Black artist, together with just a few phrases from that artist placing the work in context. This week, we’re wanting at a portray by Honor Titus, whose work has been proven at Henry Taylor’s studio gallery, and who could have his first New York solo exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery in January 2021. He attracts from a spread of influences, together with music, and used to sing in a punk band.
Name: Honor Titus
Age: 31
Based in: Los Angeles
Originally from: Brooklyn, N.Y.
When and the place did you make this work? I painted this work in the late summer season of 2020 at my studio in Vernon, Calif. I’d simply returned from a very refreshing journey to New York. There was fairly the harsh distinction between the jubilant try at life that I used to be aware of in New York and my remoted existence in the studio (and out of it) in Los Angeles. A daydreamer by nature, I used to be flooded with reminisces — recollections of careless nights which can be lengthy gone have a tendency to provide me the impression that there are extra to return.
Can you describe what’s going on in the work? A younger girl is captured middance at a sock hop. “Hops” are related primarily with the early rock ’n’ roll tradition of the Nineteen Fifties. Teenagers would dance sans footwear to keep away from scuffing the hardwood flooring. The formality inherent in such an concept actually strikes me.
What impressed you to make this work? An allusion to an easier time, nonetheless rooted in nostalgia (or misaligned) which may be. I’m wondering if the cares and ambitions of youth have actually modified over the years. Perhaps they’re weak, eager for validation and belonging, now as a lot as then. I wished to seize a way of uninhibited innocence. The spontaneity/emotion/honesty of a dance additionally actually appealed to me at the time. I’ll additionally add that I like doo-wop.
What’s the murals in any medium that modified your life? Oh, there are such a lot of! Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground undoubtedly altered the trajectory of my life. My mom would play “Walk on the Wild Side” (1972) actually loudly all through the home (in Canarsie), and I bear in mind making an attempt to know. Trying to make sense of Candy Darling and amphetamines at the age of 12. That track let me know that there was extra — greater than I’d identified as much as that time. And then “Ragged Dick” (1868) by Horatio Alger Jr. — a e-book from the tail finish of the nineteenth century a few younger, smart-mouth Bowery bootblack who, by way of honesty and laborious work, climbs his solution to respectability. This e-book let me know {that a} virtuous outlook and disposition may afford you some fortune.
