LISA BROWN CONSULTING: SOLILOQUY: Trenton Doyle Hancock at The Public Trust

SOLILOQUY: Trenton Doyle Hancock

A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, April 16, 2016, from 7-9:30 PM

Trenton Doyle Hancock

Referee, 2014

acrylic and mixed media on canvas

167.6 x 274.3 x 10.8 cm

66 x 108 x 4 1/4 inches

price on request

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The Public Trust is pleased to present Trenton Doyle Hancock in the next installment of SOLILOQUY, a series of solo exhibitions featuring a single piece of artwork. SOLILOQUY challenges the viewer to engage with an artist’s work by removing familiar viewing elements such as comparison and contrast from the traditional exhibition format. In this, there is the hope to create a more focused dialogue about the artist’s work. For the artist, it exchanges the pressure of having to fill a space with creating a single work to hold the room:

Installation view

Referee, 2014

Artist Statement:

The Referee is a 5 1/2 feet x 9 feet acrylic and mixed media painting I executed in the year, 2014. This work is representative of a particular moment along my narrative timeline. Before describing what those narrative conditions are, I will describe the conditions and events that led me through colorless times and back to an appreciation of color's full potentiality.

In around the year 2009, I deprioritized my working narrative to focus on a series of self portraits. For 3 years, my practice focused on the creation of dozens of images where I represented myself in various states of stress. In hindsight, I guess I could call this my "Garbage Pail Kid" phase. These portraits illuminated a tragicomic, abject, self-depricating, and tortured side of my psyche. At the time, I saw no other choice but to side-line my long-running narrative of Mounds and Vegans in order to focus on the darkness and understand myself better. That is to say I needed to leap a battery of psychological hurdles and create a space to experiment and re-program my imagery. By ruminating on the inevitability of my own mortality, acknowledging the absurdity and paradoxes related to being an artist, and reducing my palette to black and white, I was able to test the tensile strength of my body image in a controlled and efficient way. As painful as it was to make some of those images during that 3 year period, there was a kind of catharsis that was reached. Once on the other side of this journey, the work began to take on a new kind of color. This transformation changed how I saw myself inside and outside of the studio and became the harbinger of potential. It's as if I had become a new and beautiful moth flying free of the specific narrative expectations, the cocoon phase being the years 2009 to 2012. Creatively speaking, I no longer sought to quarantine color to cages within painting as I had done for so many years. I used color this way partly due to my skepticism on the power of color, but it probably had more to do with my own insecurities. It's a vulnerable place to be as an artist to own up to one's color and to accept the repercussions that true color may bring. I was simply tired of avoiding it, and instead, I was ready to use color as a playground, a workshop to invent new narrative associations.

I'm a step closer to describing the conditions that allowed me to create The Referee, but there were some necessary steps that needed to take place before this could happen. There were several key things that happened between 2012 and 2015 that convinced me to begin my narrative anew and pick up where I left off in 2009. Firstly, I worked with Valerie Cassel Oliver to open a 20 year drawing retrospective at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston. This show was titled Trenton Doyle Hancock, Skin and Bones: 20 Years of Drawing and it traveled to 3 other venues around the US, and allowed me an invaluable, once in a life-time window into my own practice. After spending a year and a half with this show, I had a very real reminder of the power of my narratives. Secondly, I received a grant to produce a short film about my work. An important part of the process of making this film was drafting out very detailed storyboards (basically a graphic novel). I worked with a director, sculptors, special effects artisans, print-makers, and costume designers to bring this piece to fruition. This immersed experience of seeing my characters come to life was yet another reminder of why I love to tell stories. There was something very confrontational about it, and it made me want to re-invest in my narrative. Thirdly, I experimented with animation, which allowed me full control of creating characters and being responsible for their movement. All in all, in the years 2013-14, I was able to draw and animate about 3 minutes worth of story material. This may not sound like a lot, but it was very addicting and rewarding. I definitely see myself adding to the landscape of animation in the future, a medium that lends itself quite naturally to narrative development. Lastly, I was chosen to be part of Radical Presence: The History of Black Performance Art. This show was also curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, and originated at the CAM-Houston. For the show, I re-activated a performance I did in 1998. The piece is called Devotion, and it involved me becoming my Mound character and singing a hymn that I was taught in church. In re-activating this performance with such a serious and ritualistic tone, I was able to express a different side of the Mound's nature, thus reminding me of the Mound's narrative potential, while doubling as a rite of passage back into story-telling.

With that said, I began writing the next chapter of my narrative in 2014. This new chapter is marked by the violent merging of spiritual forces into one multivalent energy. The graphic stoic reductivism of black/white (LOID) and the seemingly boundless joy expressed through the spectrum of color (PAINTER) have merged to create a new essence (PLOID). By the end of 2014, I had painted a number of smaller works that helped to describe this new narrative situation featuring Ploid, and I also finished painting the The Referee. It was the first in a series of 3 large paintings I began in late 2014 and completed in early 2015. The other two paintings, which are also of a similar scale are I Want to be at the Meeting After the Separation and I Know Just How You Feel. All 3 of these pieces articulate the explosive newness of color in my practice, and also are characterized by the layering and confusing of form. There is no longer a designated good or evil, and even the intention of the characters isn't spelled out. Each work deals with what seems to be a "front line" of 7 or 8 colorful soldiers. They all start at the top of the canvases with clear indications of a head or face, and they spill downward until their feet touch the bottom of the canvas. What happens in their torsos is a variety of chopped body parts, overlapping shapes, and interlocking patterns. For me, the artist, these pieces were a refreshing release of 6 years of pent up desires and expressed my need to reintroduce myself as the leader of a colorful graphic army.

Trenton Doyle Hancock

On view in the gallery’s small room will be Hancock’s recent edition produced with USF Graphicstudio, Mound #1 the Legend. A mixed media sculpture accompanied by an 8 x 8 inch acrylic painting on canvas. The sculpture is 27 x 16 x 16 inches, produced in a varied edition of 15: