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Trenton Doyle Hancock

Trenton Doyle Hancock

source: jamescohan
Trenton Doyle Hancock’s intricate candy-colored prints, drawings, collaged felt paintings and site-specific installations work together to tell the story of the Mounds—a group of bizarre mythical creatures that are the tragic protagonists of the artist’s unfolding narrative between good and evil. Storytelling is a central part of Hancock’s artistic practice. Each new work serves as a contribution to the saga of the Mounds, portraying the birth, life, death, afterlife, and even dream states of these half-animal, half-plant creatures, and their aggressors, the Vegans.

Influenced equally by the history of painting as by the pulp imagery of pop-culture, Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions—such as the use of color, language and pattern—into opportunities to build narrative, develop sub-plots and convey symbolic meaning. Hancock’s works are suffused with personal mythology presented at an operatic scale, often reinterpreting Biblical stories that the artist learned as a child from his family and local church community. His exuberant and subversive narratives employ a variety of cultural tropes, ranging in tone from comic-strip superhero battles to medieval morality plays and influenced in style by Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst, Henry Darger, Philip Guston and R. Crumb. Text embedded within the paintings and drawings both drives the narrative and acts as a central visual component. His resulting installations often sprawl beyond canvas edges and onto surrounding gallery walls.

As a whole, Hancock’s highly developed cast of characters acts out a complex mythological battle, creating an elaborate cosmology that embodies his unique aesthetic ideals, musings on color, language, emotions and ultimately, good versus evil. Hancock’s mythology has been translated to the stage in an original ballet, Cult of Color: Call to Color, commissioned by Ballet Austin and created by Trenton Doyle Hancock, choreographer Stephen Mills and composer Graham Reynolds. The ballet performances debuted in Austin in April 2008. He created an original mural for the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, TX, as well as a site-specific installation entitled, A Better Promise, at the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, WA.

Trenton Doyle Hancock was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, OK. Raised in Paris, Texas, 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. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; 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; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln; Canzani Center Gallery, The Columbus School 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 work is in the permanent collections of several prestigious museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill; Kemper Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; University of Texas at Austin Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, TX; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, VA; Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University, Columbus; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Wichita State University, Ulrich Museum of Art, KS. The recipient of numerous awards, Trenton Doyle Hancock lives and works in Houston, TX.
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source: jamescohan
Hancock is well known for evolving his absurdist narrative of the battle between good and evil executed across a wide variety of media that includes painting, collage, sculpture, print and the performing arts. The artist’s densely layered works incorporate text, drawing, collaged paper, plastic, felt, fur and paint to create a collision of symbols and visual tropes that evidence Hancock’s singular vision and distinctive means of storytelling.

In this new body of work, which includes paintings, wall drawings and prints, Hancock continues a retelling of his sprawling, epic battle between the forces of good, as represented by Mounds and their color-filled world, and evil, as embodied by the skeletal Vegans who live underground in a world of black and white. Peaceful creatures, Mounds survive on Mound Meat, a pink substance that once ingested allows all to experience a life of color. At the center of Hancock’s tale are two pivotal characters: Vegan leader, Betto Watchow, and enlightened Vegan prophet, St. Sesom, who introduces Vegans to the world of color. Betto views Sesom’s proselytizing as traitorous and fears his increasing power. In reaction, Betto launches an all out war against Sesom, his disciples, and the Mounds.

The main gallery will feature the centerpiece of Hancock’s show, a grid-like arrangement of eight five-foot-square canvases installed on a wall painting that references the underworld battleground. These austere works depict Color Babies and Darkness Babies, which Sesom and Betto have enlisted separately as their militia. In the title painting, Fear, a Baby, recognizable by its large egg-shaped head, looms just above the horizon as the black background is showered in pink Mound Meat, suggestive of slaughtered Mounds. The seven other works in this series each illustrate a Baby head amidst the Vegan landscape, lined up as if marching off to battle. In the eight-by-eight foot painting, Descension and Dissension, Sesom is portrayed using his telepathic powers to generate color, showering the Vegan world with prismatic rays, while in the seven-by-nine-foot painting The Bad Promise, Betto juts his bony black arm across the canvas, reaching his hand beneath a fellow Vegan’s head oozing with Mound Meat.

The exhibition will also feature a new portfolio of twenty mixed-media prints, entitled Fix, which the artist recently completed at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions, Rutgers University. The print series further evidences the influence of many artists upon Hancock’s work, including R. Crumb, Henry Darger, Lee Baxter Davis, Max Ernst, Philip Guston and Gary Panter, as well as the impact of the artist’s evangelical Christian upbringing and his insatiable appetite for contemporary art and culture.

Trenton Doyle Hancock is the 2007 Joyce Alexander Wein award winner from The Studio Museum, NY. His work is exhibitionsly in the exhibitions In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis at the Contemporary Jewish Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, and was recently part of the Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger at the American Folk Art Museum, NY. He is included in the Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial and in 2009 will produce a site-specific installation at the Olympic Sculpture Park at the Seattle Art Museum, WA. In April 2008, Hancock provided the costume and set design for Cult of Color: Call to Color, a collaboration with choreographer Stephen Mills and composer Graham Reynolds for the Austin Ballet, TX. In 2007, the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, hosted Hancock’s major European solo show, The Wayward Thinker, which traveled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Hancock was one of the youngest artists ever to be included in the Whitney Biennial, in both 2000 and 2002. Born in Paris, Texas, Hancock exhibitionsly lives and works in Houston.

Hancock’s work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Dallas Museum of Art, TX; The Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, TX; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea, Trento, Italy.