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Michael Tole

Pictures from the Queen's Collection

"First Saturdays" Opening Receptions - 4 January + 1 February 5-9 PM

December 10, 2024 – February 8, 2025

MICHAEL TOLE, Hannah Belle Leading Her Forces at the Battle of Trebbia, 2024

MICHAEL TOLE

Hannah Belle Leading Her Forces at the Battle of Trebbia, 2024

oil on canvas

72h x 72w in
182.88h x 182.88w cm

 

I was driving home from work one day and channel surfing the radio when I stopped the scanner, transfixed by a cotton candy pop melody juxtaposed with fatalistic, world-weary lyrics about the impossibility of modern romance.  This was way too complex a combo for top 40 radio, and I waited through multiple other vapid pop songs to find out who the performer was.  To my shock, it was Taylor Swift.  Being nearly middle aged, I knew who Taylor Swift was, but had ignored her as just another teen pop Diva of a younger generation.  After this blind listening, however, there was no denying her talent, her relevance, or her deep insight into romantic relationships in the contemporary world.  This forced me to face several biases that had prejudiced me against her as an artist. Without ever deeply listening to the music, I had assumed that someone who was young, conventionally pretty, blonde, female, and a pop-star, would have nothing serious or relevant for me, a male, middle aged listener.  I was wrong, and an inherited bias (one that taught me that grungy boys like Kurt Cobain dressed in gray flannels were serious and unaffected, and girls like Taylor Swift who wore sparkly pink sequins were frivolous and fake) had led me to dismiss an artist’s oeuvre on the basis of gendered stylistic conventions. 

 

My two paintings, illustrating the military triumphs of Hannah Belle Barca, are explorations of our stylistic gender biases.  In these works, I am transitioning the historical figure Hannibal Barca (the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps with elephants and spent years rampaging through Roman territory) from male to female.  By transitioning the general’s gender (and that of much of her army), I am reflecting the ascendancy of historical fiction that reimagine the past to reflect recent evolutions in gender and racial realities such as Bridgerton, and also the proliferation of women superheroes like Wonder Woman.  In addition to transitioning the gender of the general and her army, I am also transitioning the aesthetic conventions of these scenes to one that is intentionally decorative and feminine, with pastel colors, and curlicue compositions.  Battle scenes in Western art history are usually “serious” (synonymous with masculinity for most of our culture’s history since the Renaissance) and signified as such by muted color and dramatic, high contrast lighting (think of the muted color palette of the movie Dunkirk, the black and white cinematography of Shindler’s List or Goya’s Disasters of War series).  By contrast, the colors and compositions for the Hannah Belle paintings are a cross between a Fragonard and a riot at a Coachella concert.  The work dares the viewer to dismiss its content because of the bias against the aesthetics of femininity as constructed by pop culture divas like Taylor Swift, Megan the Stallion, and similar artists. 

MICHAEL TOLE, Fantasy Football, 2024

MICHAEL TOLE

Fantasy Football, 2024

oil on canvas

72h x 60w in
182.88h x 152.40w cm

 

Anyone who knows me knows I’m not much of a football fan, but it’s a big part of our popular culture and its construction of gender and masculinity make it a natural counterpoint within this series of paintings.  My wife, who comes from a sports loving family, is always trying to get me to watch a game with her.  She says a knowledge of sports is a “non-optional social convention.”  In response, I have decided to appreciate the aesthetics of the action in football on its own terms.  Though I do not have a favorite team, do not generally know the names of the players, and am not attached to the outcomes of the games, I find I can appreciate football simply because of the beauty of watching human bodies in action doing amazing things.  In short, I have come to appreciate football in the same way I appreciate ballet, break dancing, or ice skating—on aesthetic grounds.  For me, football is truly a spectator sport—a spectacle to be seen.  The reason I have selected football for this counterpoint rather than other sports is because it’s the only popular sport that has no parallel organization for women.  Football alone is uncontroversially (and inexplicably) reserved for men.  Its exclusivity makes it particularly relevant for analysis and for use as a counterpoint to the other explorations of gender in this show.

 

In the sports related paintings in this show, all metrics for success--goal posts, yard lines, and end zones--have been removed.  There is only endless, infinite space, placing all emphasis on the aesthetics of the bodies and their actions.    Also, the style is unmistakably Rococo, which has been coded as feminine, decorative, and frivolous by art historians, and which is a style appropriated by many contemporary women entertainers in their music videos.  Therefore, these pieces challenge the gender demarcations within our entertainment sector, and ideas of achievement, excellence, and what is or is not serious.

MICHAEL TOLE, The Raconteur, 2024

MICHAEL TOLE

The Raconteur, 2024

oil on canvas

66h x 68w in
167.64h x 172.72w cm

 

I have lived in Arizona for the past 11 years, and for several of those years, Kyrsten Sinema was our senator.  During her tenure in the Senate, the New York Times ran several articles scrutinizing her fashion choices and what they signified.  In them, women academics who study the field acknowledged the unfairness of this scrutiny, then proceeded with said scrutiny anyway to decode the embedded meaning of Sinema’s outfits.  For my part, the clothing Sinema wore matters less than her defection from the party she claimed to represent, but I do think it’s important to ask why there is such a gendered asymmetry in the semiosis of clothing.  I suspect that the answer is multifaceted, but I believe there is a significant factor that is often overlooked.  Looking at Sinema amidst the sea of her Senate colleagues hints at this.  While she wears a canary yellow dress with winged sleeves, the rest of her mostly male colleagues dissolve into a sea of navy and black suits.  In business and politics, men have three choices:  a blue suit, a black suit, or a gray suit.  Tan exists, but it’s risky.  With such constrained choices, interpretation has little to reveal.  Women, on the other hand, have the privilege and burden of choosing color, material, hemline, neckline, and the presence or absence of sleeves.  There are layers, scarves, jackets, belts, bags, jewelry, and of course the entire footwear constellation.  Women’s clothing speaks a rich language capable of nuance, and complex signification.  Men’s clothing speaking in grunts.  Such a differential in the available vocabulary of fashion choices makes an imbalance in semiotic decoding of that vocabulary inevitable.  That dichotomy is the seed for The Raconteur.  There is a whole other layer of research and remediation needed to explain why men and women have such imbalanced fashion vocabularies available to them, but that is for another painting. 

MICHAEL TOLE, Hannah Belle's Army Harrassed By Alpine Tribesmen, 2023

MICHAEL TOLE

Hannah Belle's Army Harrassed By Alpine Tribesmen, 2023

oil on canvas

72h x 48w in
182.88h x 121.92w cm

 

I was driving home from work one day and channel surfing the radio when I stopped the scanner, transfixed by a cotton candy pop melody juxtaposed with fatalistic, world-weary lyrics about the impossibility of modern romance.  This was way too complex a combo for top 40 radio, and I waited through multiple other vapid pop songs to find out who the performer was.  To my shock, it was Taylor Swift.  Being nearly middle aged, I knew who Taylor Swift was, but had ignored her as just another teen pop Diva of a younger generation.  After this blind listening, however, there was no denying her talent, her relevance, or her deep insight into romantic relationships in the contemporary world.  This forced me to face several biases that had prejudiced me against her as an artist. Without ever deeply listening to the music, I had assumed that someone who was young, conventionally pretty, blonde, female, and a pop-star, would have nothing serious or relevant for me, a male, middle aged listener.  I was wrong, and an inherited bias (one that taught me that grungy boys like Kurt Cobain dressed in gray flannels were serious and unaffected, and girls like Taylor Swift who wore sparkly pink sequins were frivolous and fake) had led me to dismiss an artist’s oeuvre on the basis of gendered stylistic conventions. 

 

My two paintings, illustrating the military triumphs of Hannah Belle Barca, are explorations of our stylistic gender biases.  In these works, I am transitioning the historical figure Hannibal Barca (the Carthaginian general who crossed the Alps with elephants and spent years rampaging through Roman territory) from male to female.  By transitioning the general’s gender (and that of much of her army), I am reflecting the ascendancy of historical fiction that reimagine the past to reflect recent evolutions in gender and racial realities such as Bridgerton, and also the proliferation of women superheroes like Wonder Woman.  In addition to transitioning the gender of the general and her army, I am also transitioning the aesthetic conventions of these scenes to one that is intentionally decorative and feminine, with pastel colors, and curlicue compositions.  Battle scenes in Western art history are usually “serious” (synonymous with masculinity for most of our culture’s history since the Renaissance) and signified as such by muted color and dramatic, high contrast lighting (think of the muted color palette of the movie Dunkirk, the black and white cinematography of Shindler’s List or Goya’s Disasters of War series).  By contrast, the colors and compositions for the Hannah Belle paintings are a cross between a Fragonard and a riot at a Coachella concert.  The work dares the viewer to dismiss its content because of the bias against the aesthetics of femininity as constructed by pop culture divas like Taylor Swift, Megan the Stallion, and similar artists. 

MICHAEL TOLE, The Wood Shop, 2024

MICHAEL TOLE

The Wood Shop, 2024

oil on canvas

48h x 56w in
121.92h x 142.24w cm

 

A few years ago, my neighbor’s twenty-year-old daughter moved out and started living on her own.  She had a small apartment, and an old jalopy of a car that needed a tune-up.  Being a young student, she couldn’t afford to pay a mechanic for this maintenance, so she YouTubed “DIY tune-up” and successfully did it herself for only the cost of parts.  Having paid nearly $8,000 in a three-month period for various car repairs at that time, I was equal parts jealous and impressed by her.  Though I have no mechanical talents, I am handy around the house, having renovated it and built an addition, doing nearly all of the work myself out of fiscal necessity, and saving (by the estimate of the building inspector) about $50,000 in labor costs.  Watching my neighbor do the same with her car made me realize the costs and savings of knowing these blue-collar skills.  It’s fairly accepted in our culture that these skills are more often taught to boys than girls.  But as I considered the future of my own two daughters, I had to face the reality that this bias led to a very real pink tax.  While pink tax is usually discussed in relation to hygiene products, healthcare, clothing, and other goods and services consumed mostly by women, it’s also true that the cost difference between fixing a car yourself, and paying someone else to do it can amount to a difference of tens of thousands of dollars, and potentially dwarfs all of those other costs combined. 

 

This changed my perspective on the issue and my behavior toward my daughters.  Whereas before I protected my daughters from construction (justified given their ages, regardless of their gender), I began incorporating them into this work in real ways as they entered their teen years to build this valuable skill set.  I have taught them to use saws and power tools, and to do the hard work of renovation and maintenance to the point that I now hand them the tools and hold the flashlight so they can do the fun work themselves, rather than the other way around.  In some of these DIY paintings, I’m imagining these skills being handed down from generation to generation.  As an artistic side quest, this has also given me the opportunity to explore variations in the depiction of age, a real challenge given that all my painted characters begin as stock 3D models in 3D modeling programs—digital mannequins devoid of individuality.  There are no portraits of living and breathing people in any of these paintings. 

 

Lastly, because The Garage, Bathsheba’s Garage, and the Wood Shop are explorations of a more realistic and less fantastical activity, I’ve appropriated the style of the Caravaggisti, and their blunt but relatable realism with it.

MICHAEL TOLE, In the Garage, 2024

MICHAEL TOLE

In the Garage, 2024

oil on canvas

40h x 48w in
101.60h x 121.92w cm

 

A few years ago, my neighbor’s twenty-year-old daughter moved out and started living on her own.  She had a small apartment, and an old jalopy of a car that needed a tune-up.  Being a young student, she couldn’t afford to pay a mechanic for this maintenance, so she YouTubed “DIY tune-up” and successfully did it herself for only the cost of parts.  Having paid nearly $8,000 in a three-month period for various car repairs at that time, I was equal parts jealous and impressed by her.  Though I have no mechanical talents, I am handy around the house, having renovated it and built an addition, doing nearly all of the work myself out of fiscal necessity, and saving (by the estimate of the building inspector) about $50,000 in labor costs.  Watching my neighbor do the same with her car made me realize the costs and savings of knowing these blue-collar skills.  It’s fairly accepted in our culture that these skills are more often taught to boys than girls.  But as I considered the future of my own two daughters, I had to face the reality that this bias led to a very real pink tax.  While pink tax is usually discussed in relation to hygiene products, healthcare, clothing, and other goods and services consumed mostly by women, it’s also true that the cost difference between fixing a car yourself, and paying someone else to do it can amount to a difference of tens of thousands of dollars, and potentially dwarfs all of those other costs combined. 

 

This changed my perspective on the issue and my behavior toward my daughters.  Whereas before I protected my daughters from construction (justified given their ages, regardless of their gender), I began incorporating them into this work in real ways as they entered their teen years to build this valuable skill set.  I have taught them to use saws and power tools, and to do the hard work of renovation and maintenance to the point that I now hand them the tools and hold the flashlight so they can do the fun work themselves, rather than the other way around.  In some of these DIY paintings, I’m imagining these skills being handed down from generation to generation.  As an artistic side quest, this has also given me the opportunity to explore variations in the depiction of age, a real challenge given that all my painted characters begin as stock 3D models in 3D modeling programs—digital mannequins devoid of individuality.  There are no portraits of living and breathing people in any of these paintings. 

Lastly, because The Garage, Bathsheba’s Garage, and the Wood Shop are explorations of a more realistic and less fantastical activity, I’ve appropriated the style of the Caravaggisti, and their blunt but relatable realism with it.

MICHAEL TOLE, Bathsheba's Garage, 2024

MICHAEL TOLE

Bathsheba's Garage, 2024

oil on canvas

48h x 36w in
121.92h x 91.44w cm

 

A few years ago, my neighbor’s twenty-year-old daughter moved out and started living on her own.  She had a small apartment, and an old jalopy of a car that needed a tune-up.  Being a young student, she couldn’t afford to pay a mechanic for this maintenance, so she YouTubed “DIY tune-up” and successfully did it herself for only the cost of parts.  Having paid nearly $8,000 in a three-month period for various car repairs at that time, I was equal parts jealous and impressed by her.  Though I have no mechanical talents, I am handy around the house, having renovated it and built an addition, doing nearly all of the work myself out of fiscal necessity, and saving (by the estimate of the building inspector) about $50,000 in labor costs.  Watching my neighbor do the same with her car made me realize the costs and savings of knowing these blue-collar skills.  It’s fairly accepted in our culture that these skills are more often taught to boys than girls.  But as I considered the future of my own two daughters, I had to face the reality that this bias led to a very real pink tax.  While pink tax is usually discussed in relation to hygiene products, healthcare, clothing, and other goods and services consumed mostly by women, it’s also true that the cost difference between fixing a car yourself, and paying someone else to do it can amount to a difference of tens of thousands of dollars, and potentially dwarfs all of those other costs combined. 

 

This changed my perspective on the issue and my behavior toward my daughters.  Whereas before I protected my daughters from construction (justified given their ages, regardless of their gender), I began incorporating them into this work in real ways as they entered their teen years to build this valuable skill set.  I have taught them to use saws and power tools, and to do the hard work of renovation and maintenance to the point that I now hand them the tools and hold the flashlight so they can do the fun work themselves, rather than the other way around.  In some of these DIY paintings, I’m imagining these skills being handed down from generation to generation.  As an artistic side quest, this has also given me the opportunity to explore variations in the depiction of age, a real challenge given that all my painted characters begin as stock 3D models in 3D modeling programs—digital mannequins devoid of individuality.  There are no portraits of living and breathing people in any of these paintings. 

 

Lastly, because The Garage, Bathsheba’s Garage, and the Wood Shop are explorations of a more realistic and less fantastical activity, I’ve appropriated the style of the Caravaggisti, and their blunt but relatable realism with it.

MICHAEL TOLE, Venus Requesting Arms of Vulcana, 2022

MICHAEL TOLE

Venus Requesting Arms of Vulcana, 2022

oil on canvas

36h x 24w in
91.44h x 60.96w cm

 

A common mythological narrative thread for Rococo artists was Venus Requesting Arms for Aeneas.  She was Aeneas’ patron and pushed him to found Rome with the weapons she coerced Vulcan (her cuckolded husband) to make.  In Venus Requesting Arms of Vulcana, I’ve imagined Vulcana (Vulcan’s goddess form in my pantheon) converting her munitions factory from making bombs and shells to manufacturing a selection of shoes for Venus to select from.  Cherubs bring shoes for Venus’ consideration as her acolytes look on, and cupid hunches behind her with his rifle of love. 

MICHAEL TOLE, Priestesses of Hestia at Work, 2023

MICHAEL TOLE

Priestesses of Hestia at Work, 2023

oil on canvas

36h x 24w in
91.44h x 60.96w cm

SOLD

 

A conceptual counterpoint to the dynamic described above is the influence of social media on how we present ourselves and the work we do.  For whatever reason, the first reels the Insta-algorithm showed me were mostly construction related…in particular, brick layers.  The rhythmic scrape and tap of brick laying sent me on a meditative jaunt where I envisioned a career lived completely in the mindful moment, and free of angst (a fantasy if ever there was one).  Eventually, the algorithm interjected into my feed a handful of tradeswomen using social media to advertise their construction services just like their male peers.  Next, the algorithm began sending reels of presumably real people (mostly, but not exclusively women) DIYers and contractors with definite thirst trap overtones that likely boosted their popularity over those in the first category.  That inevitably led to a third category of totally farcical videos made by influencers and Insta models making straight forward thirst trap videos for self-promotion where construction work simply provided the costuming inspo for the day.  The Priestesses of Hestia at Work was inspired by a bloopers reel of construction related mishaps from the later category.  I found this fascinating because it brought blue-collar work to the point of pure spectacle…where performative physical activity drives aesthetics much like other entertainers from singers and dancers, to actors and even professional athletes.  It is the job of all these entertainers to be seen doing.  It also dovetails nicely with the football paintings in this series where action is reduced to its aesthetic scrim.  In all of the manifestations of “work” on social media, it becomes similarly impossible to separate doing from appearing. 

MICHAEL TOLE, Fantasy Football - The Tackle, 2024

MICHAEL TOLE

Fantasy Football - The Tackle, 2024

oil on wood panel

18h x 24w in
45.72h x 60.96w cm

 

This piece addresses Barbara Kruger’s work, You Construct Intricate Rituals Which Allow You to Touch the Skins of Other Men. Contact sports are one of the culturally constructed ritual spaces that allow (mostly) cisgendered and heterosexual men to touch one another without penalty.  Our culture has historically (and still does to various extents), label and punish man on man contact.  The fact that this sport is ostensibly a place of competition and sublimated violence has historically provided cover for them to function as safe spaces for such contact without cultural and legal sanctions.

MICHAEL TOLE, The Javelin Thrower, 2024

MICHAEL TOLE

The Javelin Thrower, 2024

oil on wood panel

24h x 18w in
60.96h x 45.72w cm

 

The Javelin Thrower is a further exploration of sport and spectacle in the spirit of Fantasy football, and an attempt at reflecting varied body types within athletics.

Press Release

FERRARA SHOWMAN GALLERY is proud to present Pictures from the Queen’s Collection, the second gallery solo exhibition of newly Orlando-based artist Michael Tole. This exhibition features eleven paintings created since his debut exhibition at the gallery in 2022, having received the grand prize, solo exhibition award through his inclusion in the 25th Annual NO DEAD ARTISTS International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Art in 2021.

Tole’s purposeful yet comical blending of art historical references with contemporary visual culture was born out of an experience where he examined his pre-teens daughter’s internet content consumption. The influences, design, dress, and behaviors of these global, pop divas in their music videos denoted uncanny sensibilities associated with Romanticism, Baroque, and Rococo. Rendered in his masterful technique in oil on canvas reminiscent of artists from these movements, Tole’s paintings position female protagonists – of all ages, races, and expressions of femininity - in traditional male roles and thwart (rather than welcome) the male gaze. Pictures from the Queen’s Collection will be on view from 10 December 2024 through 8 February 2025 with an opening reception on 4 January 5-9pm and closing reception on 1 February 5-9pm in conjunction with the Arts District New Orleans’ monthly First Saturday Gallery Openings.

Tole discusses the inspiration of his recent work . . .

The new themes of female agency, diversity, and inclusivity were unquestionably positive additions to Western visual culture, yet some of the similarities between Katy Perry and Fragonard left me feeling conflicted about our culture.  After all, it was only a generation ago that many critics called out the Rococo as the exemplar of frivolous and exploitative decadence.  So what does it mean that its aesthetic conventions are now ubiquitous in media, especially media created by and for women?  Since that initial revelation, my research has expanded to include the broader fantasy industrial complex, from Hollywood to Orlando, to advertising and social media.  Through their conflation of art history, mythology, literature, and pop culture, these paintings attempt to sus out the implications of the observable ascendancy of various art historical conventions currently being used in our media landscape.

Pictures from the Queen’s Collection continues exploring these confluences, but with a deeper analysis of how style and tone can alter subject matter, a relationship that has fascinated me since my childhood.  My earliest initiation into the mystical relationship between text and tone, subject and style occurred circa 1987 while carpooling to school in the back seat of a ruby red Dodge Caravan with faux wood side panels.  For the better part of a year my three best friends and I, like blues guitarists bending a note with a wawa pedal, expertly caused the meaning of the adjective “Bad” to oscillate between its stable, centuries old definition into its own antonym by changing nothing but the pitch and tone of how it was pronounced.  That we could turn the signification of the English language on its head using nothing more than inflection was an object lesson in the intoxicating (and useful) art of modulating the literal text of what we said (subject matter) through the prismatic lens of how we said it (style). 

This intersection is fertile, if unstable, ground through which this exhibition explores by applying two historically grounded painting styles (each of which carries distinct, and historically gendered baggage) to contemporary and historical subjects.  To facilitate this, the show is conceived of as a connoisseur’s collection rather than an artist’s oeuvre.  In it, the viewer finds Caravaggisti genre scenes of women mechanics alongside Rococo-esque DIY thirst traps--similar subjects but treated in different styles, thus prompting the viewer to ponder the embedded meaning in those disparate styles.  Two of the show’s pieces are fictionalized history paintings of Hannah Belle (my gender transitioned Hannibal Barca) crossing the Alps into Italy, but the battle scenes are rendered with the contradictorily feminine coded Rococo style, which tends to neutralize the violence into decoration.  This relationship of gendered style to our perceptions of gravitas, or frivolity merits a deeper, conscious consideration. 

Press Release cont'd

Michael Tole is a figurative painter currently living in Orlando, Florida with his wife and two daughters.  Born in 1979 in Dallas, Texas, he graduated from UT Austin with a BFA in painting in 2000.  A year later, he became the youngest artist ever represented by Dallas’ Conduit Gallery where he showed for 15 years.  For the first half of his career, he created photo-based paintings of retail interiors that explored issues of class and the relationship of painting and photography. 

After relocating to Tempe, AZ his work experienced a significant shift to fantastical figurative inventions based on pop culture imagery he has encountered via his two daughters’ taste in music videos, as well as his proximity to the twin capitals of America’s fantasy industrial complex: Hollywood and Las Vegas.  This work attempts to contextualize their brand of Disney-esque hedonism within a broader historical view of Western visual culture.

As fate would have it, he relocated in the summer of 2024 to Orlando, another node of America’s fantasy industrial complex.  Tole’s work has been exhibited nation-wide, in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and New Orleans.  He has won several grants, including the $50,000 Hunting Art Prize, and the Kimbrough Grant.  His work has been reviewed in Art Forum International, San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, and Hi-Fructose.com.  

For more information, press or sales inquiries please contact Gallery Director Matthew Weldon Showman at 504.343.6827 or matthew@ferrarashowman.com. Please join the conversation with FSG on Facebook (@FerraraShowmanGallery), Twitter (@FerraraShowman), and Instagram (@FerraraShowmanGallery) via the hashtags: #MichaelTole, #FerraraShowmanGallery, and #ArtsDistrictNewOrleans.