Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye

To tailor a garment by “rock of eye” is to rely on the drape—on experience over mathematical measurement—in the fitting process. It is a kind of drawing in space—a freehand, an intuition, a trust of materials. Published on the occasion of Troy Montes-Michie’s solo exhibition at the California African American Museum (February 16–September 4, 2022), Rock of Eye is an artist’s book comprised of altered, collaged and drawn source materials, some familiar from Montes-Michie’s recent large-scale paintings and collages that center on the Black male body and his series tracing the social history and form of the zoot suit, others opening new avenues of investigation.

Rock of Eye is a tactile and sensuous artist’s book, recalling the forms of both magazines and swatch books. Troy Montes-Michie begins the sequence—of works altering material from vintage erotic magazines, French tailoring magazines, found photographs, sewing patterns, and more—with portraits that serve to distort the white gaze of the Black queer body, and inverting the boundary between hyper-visibility and invisibility. In the book, these striking disruptions metamorphose into woven abstractions and then into landscapes. His stitches are scars, reparations, suturing histories and geographies; his cuts and folds both pattern and map. These images create thresholds for new crossings: his needle hits rock. A study in the ambiguity between portraiture and landscape, Rock of Eye reflects Montes-Michie’s experience growing up in El Paso, Texas, navigating borders and the spaces between them.