COVER: Trenton Doyle Hancock / Juxtapoz / January 2016

Welcome to Trenton: Meet the Man Behind the Zebra

Interview by Gabe Scott

Excerpt:

Born in Oklahoma and raised in a racially turbulent Paris, Texas, Trenton Doyle Hancock has been weaving a complex fabric that laces elaborate fantasy into personal and familial folklore, while examining his own cultural and philosophical identity. From a young age, driven by his love for comic books and graphic novels, as well as the raconteur’s template they provide, his youthful fascinations have evolved into a fully realized alternate universe. Centered around creatures known as The Mounds, who co-exist with Hancock’s own alter-ego, Torpedo Boy, as well as other characters representing significant people in his life, he combines Southern roots and religious upbringing to comprise the narratives omnipresent in his practice. 

His personal mythology is rife with subplots and character crossovers, presented on an extravagantly theatrical scale. Life, death, afterlife, rebirth, transcendental contemplation, racism, love, hate and metamorphosis are all prime players in his great odyssey. To make this possible, Hancock’s artistic practice employs a series of formal conclusions as metaphors, and messages are meticulously honed so they can be threaded through his visionary needle. 

Over the past year, his major drawing retrospective, Skin and Bones: 20 Years of Drawing has toured museums around the country, while other aspects of his oeuvre and practice have been on display around the world. Film, performance, sculpture, writing and dance are all material in his monumental and ever expanding tapestry. 

Gabe Scott: Your drawing retrospective has traveled for the last 12 to 15 months. What has that done for you in terms of self reflection, the progress of your work, and ways you see all the individual works interacting as a whole? Do you feel differently about certain pieces? 

Trenton Doyle Hancock: I was very happy to have the opportunity to see all that stuff at once. A lot of those drawings had never been in the same room before. Walking through the show helped me objectively analyze my intentions as an artist—discovering myself anew. It enabled me to step back and make important connections about scale, material and content. That was one of the most valuable things I’d taken away from the show. It’s funny—right now, in the past week or two weeks, I’ve discovered what the drawing show has meant to me in terms of how to carry on. 

Seeing myself retrospectively has made me realize that I really like the "aesthetic of the timeline" or the collapsing of time into one space. I like seeing things I've made from different eras in the room at the same time, or all on a page. Currently, in my studio, I’m compiling information from my past, bringing it back together, and creating compositions. Like memory quilts or something like that—really digging into these specific areas of my past graphic life and exploiting them.

Read complete interview online here.

POST: Eric Mack

Eric Mack photographed in New York City by Christopher Gabello. February, 2015. 

Painting Outside of the Canvas

Text | Antwaun Sargent for Interview Magazine

Photos | Christopher Gabello

In 2012, artist Eric Mack displayed his work Honey Hollow during "Fore" (part of The Studio Museum in Harlem's ongoing exhibition series of emerging African American talent), challenging the idea that painting must be represented in a traditional, rectangular format. Mack's "painting," which was actually a blanket painted purple, hung from a wall and swayed in the breeze created by a metal fan sitting on the ground. Honey Hollow foreshadowed many works to come, all of which encompass the conceptual and performative subjectivity of ideas presented by the Maryland-born, New York-based artist.

This past Sunday, Mack's most recent work went on view alongside works by Brian Belott and Noam Rappaport at OHWOW in Los Angeles as part of the group show "Some Stew You Got Inside Your Plastic Bag, and You Always Organize The Parts So Close." Continuing his desire to expand, or perhaps nullify, the boundaries of traditional painting formats, Mack stitched together found, bought, and personal fabrics, frequently adding layers of paint, magazine images, and paper. The 27-year-old artist, who is now completing a residency at The Studio Museum, hangs his works throughout the gallery in a way that forces the audience to come face-to-face with and physically maneuver their way around. With his work Claudine, fabric hangs from a curtain rod, exposing the material's movement, allowing for a temporal understanding between viewer and object.

"It is alienating," the Cooper Union and recent Yale MFA program graduate says about the limiting nature of paintings on canvas. "There is a removal from considering painting as an object, which was a big challenge for me early on. I thought, ‘If painting is an object, then how does it speak?' I'm trying to get people to feel a closeness to painting."

Click here to read complete interview and view additional images.

IN PRINT: Shinique Smith / Sculpture / January-February 2014

Shinique Smith, The whole realm was his, 2010. Acrylic, rope, and found objects, 36 x 36 x 25 inches. © Shinique Smith.

Anonymous Exchanges: A Conversation with Shinique Smith

Text | Kathleen Whitney

Excerpt: 

Thoughtfully constructed in terms of relationships and arrangements, Shinique Smith’s freestanding sculptures, suspended objects, collages, and wall paintings are based on a formal approach to color, pattern, and design. Her works take on a number of related forms – totems, bales, swooping decorative gestures, and figures. Although the work is carefully orchestrated, it seems improvised and spontaneous. Smith has said, “I’m not attached to the final product, but I’m attached to the process of making it.” Both abstract and literal, her work involves viewers in three levels of evaluation: reading the materials as the raw things they are, estimating their social value, and considering their transformation and new juxtapositions.

KATHLEEN WHITNEY: Sometimes the work seems abstract, sometimes figurative. Do categories matter to you?

SHINIQUE SMITH: I’m working with a lot of abstraction, but I don’t set out to make something figurative or non-figurative – everything depends on what I’m working with and what happens as I go along. I want my work to be as open as possible. I have many pieces with furniture, dolls, and stuffed animals in them; sometimes those elements become part of a pattern of fabrics and colors, and sometimes they remain what they started out to be. I don’t believe in categories because they hold you back. I’m not avoiding reality, but I want transcendence and transformation. I want the viewer to see something new.

There seems to be a strong political and social narrative running through your work.

I’m concerned with three different things in my work: making something that’s beautiful, commenting on the social relationship people have with their possessions, and dealing with the politics of clothing. I’m not interested in irony; I want to have direct access to the viewer. Much of my work is politically motivated, but my intention is to make that interest ambiguous and subtle. I’m especially interested in the idea of “surplus value,” because the value of the worker’s labor and the value of the finished product are way out of balance.

Shinique Smith, Untitled (Whistler's Mother), 2009. Clothing, fabric, ribbon, rope, twine, and chair, 60 x 45 x 34 inches. © Shinique Smith.

Pick up a copy of the January/February 2014 issue of Sculpture magazine to read full story and view more images. 

IN PRINT: Betye Saar / Flaunt Magazine / Issue 131

What Might Be Over to You Is Far From Over to Me

Text | Sway Benns

Photograph | Guy Lowndes

                                       

Excerpt:

You’re wandering through the brush, looking for sustenance, the sun beating down on your concave chest. Suddenly an object falls from the empyrean heaven. You cautiously pick up this small vessel, clear as water—but hard—and emblazoned with the characters C O C A C O L A. You come to admire its aesthetics and functionality, and that’s a problem because there’s only one, and the rest of your tribe has come to admire it too. Swept up in idolatry, you’re unaware of the fact that the object of your affection is merely a mortal afterthought.

This scene, from the Australian film The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), was the inspiration for what 87-year-old Los Angeles born artist Betye Saar calls mojo-tech, and the foundation for her views on technology. “It’s an object of magic…they throw away all this ‘over’ stuff and invent something else and it keeps going and going. That’s what the mojo is: the magic technology, mojo-tech.” [Incidentally, following this interview, I was surprised to learn that The Gods Must Be Crazy is widely pegged as a slapstick comedy.]

We sit in her studio, inset in the hills of Laurel Canyon, as her pug—not so coincidentally named Miss Mojo—keeps a watchful eye out for an unoccupied hand to perform an obligatory belly rub. Lining the shelves around us are groupings: mini twig furniture, paint-chipped birdcages, and wood figurines. Saar, a recent recipient of MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award, pulls out a piece, her own objet magique: a circuit board stripped bare, reconfigured in an assemblage. “The only thing that I like about technology is some of the components that are used—like the circuit boards—because they just seem too beautiful. They use real gold and real silver because that traps the electricity. That’s how I relate to technology; the components of it and how beautiful they are and what I can visualize with them.”

To read complete story and view additional images, pick up a copy of Issue 131 of Flaunt on newsstands now or read online here.