In Conversation: Shaunté Gates on Poppies & Parachutes

 Horsemen Of The Derby no.2, 2026. Acrylic paint, photo,

pulled paper, collage, pennies, thread, on wood panel

48 x 48 in (121.92 x 121.92 cm)

By JAKOB DWIGHT February 26, 2026

Shaunté Gates’ dreamlike painted collages feature figures moving through a terrain suspended between spectacle and awareness, between cinema and reality. I spoke with him recently about some of the ideas behind his work overall and how a background in film and television have influenced him in his newest work in The Night Before: Poppies & Parachutes.

Can you say more about the influence of Edward Bernays and Guy Debord on your thinking and work?

My interest in Edward Bernays and Guy Debord developed during my tenure as a motion graphics artist at BET Networks from 2006 to 2015. Working inside that system definitely sharpened my awareness of how images move and persuade.

Learning about Bernays’ propaganda campaigns for corporations during World War II and then discovering that he was Freud’s nephew, blew my mind: the idea that desire and consent could be engineered through psychology felt like a form of warfare embedded in everyday life.

Around that time, I was already making work that critiqued the effects of mass media. Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle gave language to what I was intuitively exploring. The idea that lived experience becomes mediated by representation: whether through public art, navigating my dreams, or incorporating whatever is around me, photos of friends, video game screenshots, movie stills, fragments of my environment.

Between Columns and The Landing, 2026. 

Acrylic paint, photo, pulled paper, collage, thread, 

guinea fowl feather on wood panel

48 x 72 in (121.92 x 182.88 cm)

Your work has partly been explained as being about competition and overcoming, does this description relate to the ideas of those two figures?

It’s less about competition in the literal sense and more about the machinery behind it. I’ve been drawn to vehicles of transport like chariots, horses, or parachutes because they also operate as instruments of war, sport, or spectacle. There’s a historical intersection there that I keep going to. When people speak about overcoming in my work, I think of resilience rather than victory. Not conquering an opponent, but navigating systems that frame triumph and loss for us. Today warfare is televised, politics is gamified.

The series mantra if you will / text on the studio wall is:

How Do You Come Down From A Myth? How Do You Land? How do you come down from the stories that told you who you are, what you are, to become who you really are?

The scenes and mood in these newest works are lighter, more open skies, seemingly more calm compositions, what was different in your approach to making them?

They revisit the open spaces I explored prior to the heavier, denser compositions of the earlier Poppies & Parachutes works. Narratively, “The Night Before” refers to the night before the landing - it’s that suspended threshold. The tension before impact, possibly war. After the parachutes land…it feels almost like a band of Olympians journeying upriver, in the spirit of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. They’re either going into something or emerging from it. Possibly both.

I started using the poppy around 2012 as a motif, then a paradox unfolded: this beautiful flower, historically used to commemorate soldiers lost to war as a symbol of sacrifice and remembrance. Yet that same flower produces opium, a substance that has fueled wars, destabilized nations, and, when manufactured and distributed in certain ways, can cripple the spirit of an entire community. The wounded soldier depends on morphine to dull unbearable pain. The same source, different context: between beauty and devastation, commemoration and destruction, healing and harm.

They Found The Great Beauty And Something Else, Where The Flamingos Rest, 2026

Acrylic paint, photo, pulled paper, collage, thread, on wood panel

48 x 72 in (121.92 x 182.88 cm)

The parachutes entered as engineered descent or manufactured control suspended in open space, sometimes. Because of my background in television, I naturally think in sequences.“The Night Before” definitely feels like a prequel within the larger arc of the Poppies & Parachutes series, but one that isn’t linear, but instead atmospheric.

The Night Before: Poppies & Parachutes is on view at Marc Strauss Gallery, New York, until February 26, 2026