Whatever the reason, anyone viewing the works of artist Trenton Doyle Hancock - from smaller canvases jammed with form, color, and movement, to entire rooms covered floor to ceiling with text and imagery - knows that he does not chose to express himself in a small way. As for his new publication, “ME A MOUND,” it may look like a 9x12 inch hardcover book, but it is best not to judge by it‘s cover..
With a cast of characters including, Mounds, Torpedo Boy and evil Vegans, Hancock has drawn upon 8-9 years of creative experience developing a narrative based upon a personal mythology , under the influence of underground comics, bible-belly religious imagery and cartoons. Describing the process at a talk this week, he referred to a conversation between text and images, with “the paintings dictating what the text is going to be in the end.”
The self-described maximalist has packed into 168 pages an imagined universe in words and pictures. Published by PictureBox
Inc. and James Cohan Gallery, the volume also has great tactile appeal, with a cover that begs to be poked or stroked and layers of texture with that make it an adventure to simply turn a page.The setting for the artists’ talk, with a panel consisting of Hancock and artist Fred Tomaselli, moderated by Dan Nadel of PictureBox, was the large room at the Cohan Gallery installation of “In The Blestian Room,” Hancokc’s current show, and the walls surrounding the paintings were covered with text, with the name of the show as the repeated motif (Blestian being, according to the artist, a contraction of “Blessed“ and “Christian“).
Seated among the full house of spectators I overheard the words “surrounded by blood and body parts.” Indeed we were, but despite the obsessive array of grotesque, skeletal and blob-like figures, there is also something joyful, captivating and ultimately satisfying about the experience of being with these works. Perhaps it has something to do with the Easter-candy colors that accent Hancock’s often white-on-black visions, but it may also be that his choice to study, as an adult artist, his childhood drawings in order to in his words, “mimic the confidence,” finds a way through the art to touch that part in all of us.
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