Salon Highlight: Darryl DeAngelo Terrell

Exhibitions

Salon Highlight: Darryl DeAngelo Terrell
May 14 - June 22, 2022

Featured Artwork

Louis Buhl & Co. presents our latest Salon Highlight installment featuring a series of photographs by Darryl DeAngelo Terrell. Terrell is a Detroit based artist who works primarily within lens-based media to explore the displacement of Black and Brown people, femme identity and strength, the Black family structure, sexuality, gender, and safe spaces. Pulling from influences they observed growing up on the Eastside of Detroit, Terrell's work is also a reflection of popular culture traversed through media such as music, movies, and other similarly related sources. Through photography, video, and performance art, it is Terrell’s goal to aid larger conversations about Blackness and its many intersectionalities. ⠀

While pursuing their MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, they began experimenting with performance art and gender expression which lead to their creation of alter-ego Dion, a hyper-feminine and sensual character that plays a leading and continuous role in the artist’s multimedia practice. Pulling from the Black urban aesthetic (i.e. wigs, makeup, luscious fur coats, braggadocious jewelry and other items that allude to Black queer opulence), Terrell transforms themself into a fictional identity that, in their mind, exhibits everything they lack; Dion is a manifestation of the artist’s high-femme self, exploring what it means to not only be viewed as whole and worthy of living, but utterly desirable. 

For their Salon Highlight, Terrell has produced four photographs that spotlight Dion’s hands. Set against rich textures, they wear an array of decadent accessories, from gaudy nails to chains of white pearls and luscious velvet gloves, exuding a sense of maximalist luxury. The focus on the hand as an extension of Dion ties back to the influence of Terrell’s mother growing up and her warm, tactile nature that she passed down to them. Terrell recalls memories of shopping with their mother, and her common tendency to touch everything she saw, every fabric, motivated by the desire to experience the objects to their fullest degree through the act of touch. Conceptually, the series is motivated by this ego-centric idea that “whatever Dion wants, Dion gets;” this confidence is an essential and defining characteristic of the sought after individual. When it comes to the artist’s “Dion” series, the works featured in the show  are unique in that the audience is presented with a sense of mystery and wonderment as to who the hand belongs to. Terrell does not visually disclose Dion’s entire identity, which illuminates the feminine characteristics and associations that they aim to embody. 

Salon Highlight: Darry DeAngelo Terrell is on view from May 14 through June 22, 2022.

Featured Artwork

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