Troy Montes Michie: “Black on the Face of the Moon”
Installation view of Troy Montes Michie: Black on the Face of Moon at Company Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy of Company gallery.
Troy Montes Michie’s third solo show at Company Gallery is an intimate look into two lives in unison through a dialogue that takes place decades apart. The project is rooted in the artist’s exploration of Richmond Barthé at the Amistad Research Archive in New Orleans. From Michie’s contemporary gaze into the life of a Harlem Renaissance artist, the viewer is presented with a series of works that dive deep into private realms, while exposing nothing explicitly.
Family portraits, photos of events, covers of old books, and images straight from magazines that are layered, collaged, overlaid, and even stitched onto each other reveal a breadth of a person not usually offered. Even if the values of these individual pieces of imagery are not ostensibly clear, Michie imbues each piece with importance through exploring their possible meanings. Drawing from camouflage theory for this project, Michie applies “various mediums that simultaneously conceal and reveal his subjects,” and the result is much like writing in a stream of consciousness in a visual format. [1] Following along with these images and mediums then becomes a game in personal associations of the audience and their guesses of what it might have meant, or mean today.
Installation view of Troy Montes Michie: Black on the Face of Moon at Company Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy of Company gallery.
In Michie’s presentation, familiarity is questioned and challenged. How do we get to know someone? It is a practice in the validating effect of engaging with another’s life that provides substantial understanding of one’s own life. Whether or not this is a statement true for the artist in question, such acts of secondhand authenticity is something akin to what one might feel when looking at old family albums—either with forgotten or unknown people passing themselves off as family, or remembered through memories of others.
The gallery’s largest hall is divided into three spaces: three rooms divided by walls specific to the show, each with a window installed. The rooms have chairs, some with photographs attached to them, some without—but they are not necessarily inviting in their function. Radiators sit in rooms without pipes or attachments, solitary like sculptures. Similar to the windows and chairs, they have a vintage feel: a sense of use and disuse. These accessory elements in the space lend to the sensorial experience, helping the audience imagine themselves in settings that open doors to deeper realms of intimacy or involvement.
Installation view of Troy Montes Michie: Black on the Face of Moon at Company Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy of Company gallery.
As much as each side of the wall is the inside space of the room, the window leading to the inside of the other room puts the viewer in a position of looking in rather than out of the window. The windows are built into the walls, and in all likelihood existed in use somewhere else before this. The press release emphasizes on the liminality of the constructed rooms; they present openings where the voyeur is validated, but do not help in any greater accessibility of the works presented—rather enhance the situation of always being an outsider to the conversation in play. The exhibition positions its audience in such a way that the voyeuristic gaze is unavoidably embodied in the participation of looking.
Such intense attention is given to installation and presentation in the making of an exhibition: the walls are impeccable, the lighting perfect. The only element where the illusion is broken is a radiator in the second room where a neon orange patch of spray paint yanks the audience out from the reality of the presented project. The contemporary element contradicts not the artist’s intentions or the project’s theoretical integrity but the aesthetic integrity of the trans-temporality rooted in the vintage.
Troy Montes Michie, Trust Fall, 2024. Cut paper, graphite, and acrylics on Rives, 13 x 17 1/2 in. Image courtesy of Company Gallery.
On a chance encounter with the artist, he revealed that anomalies in continuations of a style present for him many possibilities that are potent and undefined—spaces for contemplation and imagination left open beyond the structured presentation of works in a gallery space. He further revealed that within the context of this particular project, the change in the visualization of such a narrative might help to break the possibilities of indulgent romanticization inherent to retrospective image making or nostalgic dialogues—something that would then establish the multiple temporalities without removing the present moment.
As welcoming as the works may be, it feels like an invitation to engage with two people conversing in a different language—and as much as it may remain a mystery, it is an intriguing one, perhaps even one not meant for all to understand. This intimacy is beyond definition: the inner workings of a mind in solitude when presented with a library of visuals. Michie weaves the information together, sometimes literally, into clusters of probabilities, and proclivities—and none shall know where his life overlaps with that of Barthé.
Installation view of Troy Montes Michie: Black on the Face of Moon at Company Gallery, 2025. Image courtesy of Company gallery.
Troy Montes Michie: Black on the Face of the Moon is on view at Company Gallery from March 13 to April 26, 2025.
[1] For further reading, see the exhibition text for Black on the Face of the Moon, Company Gallery, 2025.