“Make-Believe,” an exhibition at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center featuring the work of Georgia Saxelby and Devan Shimoyama, explores artistic world-building and the crafting of alternate realities. The exhibition presents sculptures by Saxelby and paintings by Shimoyama in the context of a post-pandemic world where fantasies and the imagination have played increasingly vital roles. “Make-Believe” considers the artists’ shared use of decoration, craft and visual pleasure, both using highly saturated, lustrous and reflective surfaces to blur the real and the imaginary.
The artists draw on cultural and aesthetic histories outside the fine art canon, such as, fashion, drag, cinema, animation, furniture, costume jewelry and interior design. These new bodies of work allow the artists to better understand the contributions of queer, black and women practitioners, as well as, the ways fantasy intersects with ideas of camp, queerness and femininity.
Devan Shimoyama: Tarot Series
In Devan Shimoyama’s latest series, Tarot, the artist takes inspiration from the centuries-old divination practice of card reading. The Tarot Series expands on the cards in the tarot deck known as the Major Arcana (or the 22 named or numbered cards in the pack). Contextually, Shimoyama is influenced by the well-known Rider-Waite and Marseille tarot decks, though his personal collection includes many more variations as well as oracle decks.
After a period of self-reflection, Shimoyama’s interest in mythological practices and symbols led to his 2021 exhibition, All the Rage at Kunstpalais Erlangen in Germany and more recently, Make-Believe American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C. Here, characters of ambiguous gender represent the Major Arcana, mythological creatures, and embodiments of meditation while, in a more general sense, explore the crafting of alternative realities.
