Zeit Contemporary Art is pleased to present How Bats Drink Water, an online exhibition of works by Vincent Tiley, on view from April 10 to June 22, 2019, and curated by Evan Garza. This is the first exhibition to focus on Tiley's Rope Paintings, a group of works made between 2016 and 2019 that are tied closely to ideas of the body: its absence, and the material elements of sexuality. Tiley evokes the body without ever depicting it, drawing instead on touchstones borrowed from Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and geometric abstraction.
"The body is a point of almost total potential," Tiley explains. "The potential to expand outward connecting and touching a world of other bodies around it, and also a space to be entered. The body is a vortex of forces being swallowed up and expelled out." Tiley gives that potential physical form through Shibari, the knots and binding methods of an erotic bondage practice with origins in 18th- and 19th-century Japan, tying the paintings firmly to ideas of exquisite control and performed eroticism, and marking the work as inherently, powerfully queer. Shibari carries a long history in queer fetish culture and in Japanese gay BDSM manga, where its knots become a language for control, power, and submission. The rope and jute in these paintings mimic Shibari's own aesthetic arrangement, with each junction of tied rope emphasizing sensuality, vulnerability, and strength, so that the same dynamics at play in fetish and bondage practice, dominance and passivity, submission, tops and bottoms, surface in the paintings too.
That dynamic extends to material choice. The fabrics Tiley uses, and the way he treats them, from high-shine organza to black silk satin chiffon and denim, carry their own material sexuality, and few materials are as bound up with eroticism as leather and latex, both of which recur throughout the work. In I Promise You've Got Nothin' to Worry About (2017), a pink patent leather midriff top hovers above a Lurex velvet bottom that catches the light like lube and glitter. Teen (2018), a torso-sized painting in tempera on light-wash denim, conjures the casual eroticism of torn jeans and an Abercrombie & Fitch ad campaign; its rope knots read less like restraints than like friendship bracelets. Taken together, the paintings have the feel of something Rick Owens might collect: dark, inventive, sexy, and a little brooding.
The titles carry their own charge. Club Orpheus (2017), worked in tempera on neoprene with rope and hardware, borrows its name from a Baltimore goth and fetish club; Drummer (2017), rendered in high-shine silk organza coated with a semen-colored acrylic gel and bound in sleek lines of Shibari knotting, shares its name with the magazine that chronicled gay leather subculture from the 1970s into the late 1990s. Read closely, the titles across the show function almost like hanky code: a set of quiet signals that give themselves away only to those who already know how to read them.
Much here, as in queer culture and fetish scenes more broadly, is implied rather than stated outright. The body is central to these works, especially to the sexuality so many of them carry, yet no body ever actually appears. What's left is a strange, ghost-like presence: an absence that somehow still fills the room, and a body of work that holds, in its place, the material evidence of action, restraint, and performance.
About the Artist
Vincent Tiley (b. 1987, West Virginia) holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Around the time of this exhibition, his work had already been shown at the Museum of Art and Design, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, AxeNeo7, CFHILL, and the International Museum of Surgical Science, and reviewed in Art in America, The Chicago Tribune, Performa, and The New York Times; it is held in the collections of the Whitney Library, the Leather Archives and Museum, Yale University Library, and the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the years since, Tiley's practice has expanded into performance, leatherwork, and works on paper. In 2024 he presented Flesh Becomes Stone, a two-person exhibition with the sculptor Jerry Torre (the former Grey Gardens gardener known as the Marble Faun) at SITUATIONS and New Discretions in New York, closing with the durational performance Silverfish, and he has since held residencies at the Villa Lena Foundation in Tuscany and the Vermont Studio Center (2023) and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Arts Center program (2024). Tiley now serves as Curriculum Advisor and Discipline Expert in Experimental Fashion + Performance, and part-time Assistant Professor of Studio Art, at the Kentucky College of Art and Design in Louisville.