Monsieur Zohore Ivorian-American, 1993

Monsieur Zohore is an Ivorian-American artist based in New York and Richmond, Virginia. His practice is invested in the consumption and digestion of culture through the conflation of domestic quotidian labor and art production. Through performance, installation, and sculpture, his practices explore queer history alongside his Ivorian-American heritage through a multi-faceted lens of humor, economics, art history, and labor. The artist’s work incorporates multifarious materials and objects as part of lively engagements with pop culture.

In his ten years as a practicing artist, Zohore has been invited to exhibit projects at such venues as The Phillips Collection ( D.C), Sculpture Center (New York), The Clarington Art Center (Canada), Pace Live (New York), Spurs (Beijing) Tick Tack (Belgium), The Baker Museum (Florida), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore), The Washington Project for the Arts (D.C), and The Columbus Museum (Ohio) He is also the Assistant Professor of Painting at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Zohore’s paper towel works make use of Bounty Paper Towels and bleach to elicit the idea of the bathetic body; toxic, wasteful, and disposable as a metaphor for the treatment of marginalized domestic workers. The comedy contained within these durable yet disposable materials quickly transfigures itself into a drama of social inequities. The material has an intended sense of labor; implying a laboring body—a typically marginalized laboring body—equally durable and disposable. His relentless images force a viewer to contemplate their own ideas of shame and their relationship to labor.