Curated by Olivier Fuller, this will be Willis Thomas’ first exhibition in Canada.
Opening Thursday May 14th, 6–9 pm
ARTIST TALK SATURDAY MAY 16 at 1pm

Georgia Scherman Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition by American artists
Hank Willis Thomas. Visionary Delusions excavates the “Still Revolution” that has not only distorted Black American culture but has also fuelled the powerful corporate propagation of a false utopia. Curated by Olivier Fuller, this CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival Feature Exhibition showcases, for the first time in Canada, Thomas’ most significant bodies of recent work B®ANDED and Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America.

Sourced from an evolving mass of iconic images of corporate advertising, Willis Thomas’ work explores the creation of the cultural African-American identity. By mining the marketing imagery of brands through five decades, Thomas draws out parallels between contemporary relationships and those of the past, exposing underlying cultural and racial signifiers and stereotypes.

Unbranded presents a series of images taken from magazine advertisements dating from 1968 to the present, digitally manipulated to be devoid of any original texts and logos. The removal of all aspects of advertising information exposes the reinforced delusional cultural constructs embedded in the images.

B®anded employs the ubiquitous language of advertising to poignantly comment on issues of gender, race, class and history. The idiom of the medium as the message is explicitly dissected through Willis Thomas’ re-appropriation of corporate advertising and branding.

“The reason I work in the language of advertising is that more than half the world is literate in that language. We’re all inundated. My goal is to try to imbed my own propaganda and agenda in the already existing language of advertising.” HWT

Willis Thomas received his BFA in Photography and Africana Studies at New York
University’s Tisch School of Arts and his MA in Visual Criticism and MFA in Photography from the California College of Arts. He has shown extensively both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at PS1, New York, The Studio Museum, Harlem, and the Zacheta National Museum of Art, Poland and was most recently was included in 30 Americans from the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and the Aperture West Book Prize from which his first monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published and which will be available during CONTACT. He is represented in New York by Jack Shainman Gallery.

Exhibition hours are Tuesday-Friday, 10am to 5pm, Saturday, 11am to 5 pm, or by appointment. To schedule an interview, request images or obtain more information on the exhibition, please contact the gallery: 416.554.4112 or info@georgiascherman.com