Four Summer Shows Not to be Missed

Four Summer Shows Not to be Missed!

If you are in Santa Fe, Los Angeles, or London please take time to see four breathtaking exhibitions by Steve Dennie, Vernon Fisher, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and 

Nic Nicosia:

James Kelly Contemporary is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Steve Dennie entitled Volume Two. This exhibition will be the gallery's first for Dennie.

The exhibition will consist of 25 black and white photographs from his 2015 series called Volume Two, which comes directly from his recently published two catalogues set, Volume One and Volume Two.

Dennie is a street photographer, but not in the usual sense of the term. Instead of photographing people interacting in urban locations, he photographs the familiar outdoor locations he encounters on a daily basis, which do not include people, just the environments. This intentional absence of human life in the work helps evoke the emotional response he is looking for.

The artist states:

“Since 2013 I have been documenting the changes in my everyday landscape. What attracts me is the visually mundane and how it transforms itself into the formal elements of a photograph by blurring the lines between the esthetics of painting and photography.

In general, each location is scouted for weeks, with information recorded in a journal regarding the best time to photograph at each location. The use of line and space creates a common visual esthetic that weaves its way throughout the images giving the photographs cohesiveness.”

This clear esthetic, and absence of the human presence, is Dennie’s hallmark and gives the photographs in the Volume Two series its elegant cohesiveness.

Steve Dennie was born in 1954 in Dallas, TX, where he currently lives and works. Dennie received a B.F.A. in 1979 from the University of North Texas.

Dennie has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX; San Antonio Art Institute, San Antonio, TX; New Orleans Museum, New Orleans, LA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Hallwalls Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA. 

Opening Reception: June 18, 7-9pm 

On View June 18 – July 18 2015 

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to present “Vernon Fisher: A Retrospective," curated by Hugh Davies – Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (CA). For nearly forty-five years, Fisher has been creating innovative mixed media works that reckon with disjointed streams of consciousness and push the boundaries of post-modernism. Having exhibited widely since the late 1970s, this retrospective presents hallmark works from various stages in Fisher’s career, and highlights his preoccupation with archive, information transmission, memory, and taxonomy.

Drawing upon his early interest in how people make sense of the world, Fisher weaves together literary references, pop cultural imagery, and cartography with his own symbolic lexicon. Renouncing the convention of a singular or autonomous narrative, his works imply a seemingly endless metonymic chain. Hugh Davies first saw Fisher's work in the late seventies and was immediately impressed with the combination of conceptual rigor, and consummate craftsmanship. Davies, along with co-curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, organized a mid-career retrospective of Fisher’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 1989. In the accompanying catalogue essay, critic Dave Hickey stated that Fisher works in a kind of formula of “imperfectly analogous juxtapositions of three imperfectly distinct kinds of phenomena (the personal, the social, the natural), described by three imperfectly distinct information systems (the literary narrative, the iconographic image, and the cartographic grid).” In viewing various works made over time, these “imperfectly analogous juxtapositions” begin to form their own story, revealing Fisher’s expertise in creating a unique and elusive narrative with a comic’s sensibility. 

Vernon Fisher (b. 1943, Texas) has been included in two Whitney Biennials (most recently in 2000). Museum installations include the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Hirshhorn Museum (D.C.), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL). Major public collections include: Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, (NY), Art Institute of Chicago (IL), Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Dallas Museum of Art (TX), Denver Art Museum (CO), Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis (MN), High Museum of Art, Atlanta (GA), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX), Museum of Modern Art (NY), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Phoenix Art Museum (AZ), San Antonio Museum of Art (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (CA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY), Tucson Museum of Art, (AZ), Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (MN). The artist lives and works in Fort Worth, TX.

Private View: Friday 22 May, 6-8:30pm

Trenton Doyle Hancock in Conversation with Zoe Whitley: Tuesday 19 May, 7pm 

Hales Gallery is delighted to announce I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with renowned American artist Trenton Doyle Hancock. Hancock has exhibited widely across North America and in other countries in Europe and Asia, but I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation will be Hancock’s first major solo exhibition in London.

Trenton Doyle Hancock has, since childhood, been interested in issues of morality and ethics. He grew up in an all American household governed by Christian ideals and over a lifetime has developed his own parallel (sometimes contradictory) value system incorporating his love of toys and the narratives played out by comic book characters. What began simply in his youth necessitated by a desire to manage a seemingly endless amount of resources, questions and life information, has continued as a grand narrative into adult life, pulling in a deepening understanding of life's thematic complexities, current events and existential conundrums which have come to form the complex narrative basis for Hancock’s paintings, drawings, murals, theatrical performances and film. This, combined with constant inspiration drawn from classical comic book imagery, pop art and American cinema (especially the horror genre), as well as the aesthetic of classic prints (Durer, Goya, Daumier, Kathe Kollwitz, etc.), creates Hancock’s unique approach to collaged painting. 

I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation takes its title from a verse in a popular gospel hymn often performed in American Baptist churches. Like many of the titles Hancock uses, I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation has a personal history for the artist: the hymn was introduced to his local congregation by Hancock’s late grandmother and was also a favourite of his step-father’s, a minister in the local parish. I Want To Be at the Meeting After the Separation will feature a number of new paintings, part of Hancock’s ongoing grand saga portraying the birth, death, afterlife and dream-like states of a range of characters, particularly the Mounds (half-animal, half-plant like creatures) and their aggressors, the Vegans. The new body of work, however, is described by Hancock as “a new beginning” and shifts the storyline by preparing ground for the introduction of a series of new characters.

In the new paintings the two opposing forces – Loid (the being with stark, paternal energy) and Painter (the being with colourful, lenient, maternal energy), both recurring characters in Hancock’s previous works – are re-joined having been separated early on in Hancock’s narrative, around 50,000 years ago. As Loid is characteristically known for his use of black and white, and Painter by her colour-coded signature, Hancock’s merger of the two has created a new unified being named "Ploid". Hancock imagines their merger causing an upset in the atmospheric balance set out in the previous storyline and the three large paintings in the exhibition – I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation, Referee, and I Know Just How You Feel – illustrate the moments of adjustment as our eyes attempt to focus and our brains try to decide where one being stops and the other begins. The three paintings also set out and describe the conditions which make the smaller paintings in the exhibition. These smaller works each represent a skewed path branching off from these larger pieces. The new monumental works set the stage for the imminent debut of Ploid (the being that unites Painter and Loid), Betto (Ploid’s nemesis), Torpedoboy (Ploid’s son and an incarnation of Hancock himself), UNDOM ENDGLE (the long lost reincarnation of Ploid’s daughter), Junior (Torpedoboy’s and Undom’s child that is destined to save the world) and others. I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation is a new beginning, an entrance way into a new dramatic turn in Hancock’s narrative. 

"Private situations, thoughts, and emotions directed the concepts of the art in this show. The sculptural props, drawings, and other materials needed to realize the concepts in these photographs were fabricated or gathered within the studio and now exist as stand-alone objects separate from the photographs.

Although the art does originate from personal experience, I have always preferred simply to present the picture, drawing or object directly to the viewer. Thus allowing the viewer to decipher or complete the story based on their emotions and experiences."

Increasingly in his work, Nicosia has pulled back the curtain to reveal some of the workings behind his photographs. In this exhibition, he will be showing some of the sculptures that he created as props for these photographs. Showing his props is a continuing process for him, and this will be the second exhibition at the gallery where he has agreed to show these sculptures.

Also, Nicosia will show a group of unique small-scale drawings displayed in a grid, and will be the first time he has shown a series of drawings on paper.

Nicosia will also create a unique large-scale wall drawing for the exhibition. He will make the drawing using a large-scale graphite pencil.

Nic Nicosia was born in 1951 in Dallas, TX, and currently lives in Santa Fe, NM.

In addition to being a photographer, Nicosia received a BS in Radio-TV- Film from the University of North Texas and has made several films throughout his career. 

Lisa Brown Consulting

For nearly two decades since his graduation from Temple University, Trenton Doyle Hancock has brought to life a cast of colorful—and often not so colorful—characters through his work. At the center of Hancock’s storytelling is an imaginative and epic narrative about fictional creatures called the Mounds, who populate a wildly fantastic, inventive landscape. The artist’s use of vivid imagery and mythology has earned him national and international recognition and prompted a fascination with the foundation of his practice. What emerges upon further examination of those foundations is a wide-range of influences including comics, graphic novels, cartoons, music, and film. While Hancock’s paintings have become widely known, his drawings–both discrete and monumental–have not been fully explored before now. Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing is the first in-depth examination of Hancock’s extensive body of drawings, collages, and works on paper.

The exhibition features more than two hundred works of art as well as a collection of the artist’s notebooks, sketchbooks, and studies, many showing the preparation for several public commissions. Comprehensive in scope, this survey includes works from 1984 to 2014, chronicling the foundation of the artist’s prolific career. The exhibition provides a glimpse into the evolution of Hancock’s idiosyncratic vision beginning in his childhood. Ephemera such as early childhood drawings and the artist’s comic strip that ran in a college newspaper are featured to allow viewers to see the genesis of the artist’s mythology as well as the evolution of his practice. 

Skin and Bones includes a range of the artist’s presentation of drawings from graphite on paper to paper affixed to canvas, from the use of collage to the use of wall as an expansive plane for monumental works. Inherent in the presentation of these drawings is the exploration of the artist’s conceptual framework and the narratives that manifest throughout his bodies of work. The exhibition presents a more focused concentration on his use of line and mark making as well as his approach to the tradition of drawing and his ability to implode that tradition through mechanical dexterity and conceptual weight.

The exhibition is organized into five sections:

Epidemic includes ephemera such as the artist’s early sketches, cartoons that he created for his college newspaper first at Paris Junior College and then later at Eastern Texas State University (now Texas A&M at Commerce), and features the debut of a new series of thirty drawings entitled Step and Screw.

The Studio Floor is a series of ten drawings that Hancock credits as the catalyst to his subsequent practice of bringing the graphic narrative of comic books and cartoons into his contemporary art practice.

Moundish includes drawings associated with the artist’s iconic mythology of the Mound: its birth, life, and death; the cosmology of characters that it encounters; and the struggles between good and evil.

From the Mirror examines self-portraiture within his work from the past two decades.

The final section, The Liminal Room, showcases stand-alone works that explore the artist’s experimentation with drawing as a medium and practice.

Among the works featured are monumental, site-specific wall drawings, wallpaper created by the artist and produced by the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, as well as the debut of a digital animation by the artist. The exhibition is organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, CAMH Senior Curator.  The exhibition will be on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston through August 3, 2014 before travelling to the Akron Art Museum in Ohio where it will be on view September 6, 2014, to January 4, 2015.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Trenton Doyle Hancock was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, OK, and lives and works in Houston, TX. Raised in Paris, TX, Hancock earned his BFA from Texas A&M University, Commerce, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. Hancock was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, becoming one of the youngest artists in history to participate in this prestigious survey. He had his first solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2001. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa; The Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah and Atlanta; The Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; CanzaniCenter Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, OH; Olympic Sculpture Park at the Seattle Art Museum, WA; The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Hancock’s mythology has been translated to the stage in an original ballet, Cult of Color: Call to Color, commissioned by Ballet Austin and Arthouse (now The Contemporary Austin). The ballet set design and costumes were created by Hancock with choreography by Stephen Mills and an original composition by Graham Reynolds. The ballet performances debuted in Austin in April 2008. 

PUBLICATION
Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing will be accompanied by a significant monograph of the artist’s drawings and works on paper. The publication will include an introduction and essay by the organizing curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, as well as contributions by Brooke Davis Anderson and transcribed conversations between Hancock and artists Gary Panter and Stanley Whitney. The monograph will also feature color images of the works presented in the exhibition, a bibliography of general reading, and a biography on the artist. The overall scope and comprehensive material featured in the accompanying catalogue promises to serve as a scholarly reader and a critical and lasting document for the exhibition. The monograph will be available in early Fall 2014.

Valerie Cassel Oliver, Senior Curator

Cult of Color

I am thrilled to drive to Austin tomorrow with my oldest daughter to see Ballet Austin's Cult of Color: Call to Color.  A collaborative ballet by Choreographer Stephen Mills, Visual Artist Trenton Doyle, and Musician Graham Reynolds.

Here is a brief synopsis of the ballet:

For centuries now the Vegans have lived in a dark, underground cave.  It is a black and white world, completely devoid of color....

Main Characters:

Click here to purchase tickets!!