SEATTLE, WA.- For over a decade, Houston-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock has developed a dramatic narrative featuring a cast of colorful – and often not so colorful – characters, who populate a wildly fantastic invented landscape. Through paintings, works on paper, sculptures and performance, Hancock’s fiction has become an epic saga chronicling the peace-loving Mounds and the often vindictive Vegans, who have lost their ability to see in color. The artist recounts tales of these figures through vivid imagery that reaches mythological proportion and shows evidence of wide-ranging artistic influences, including comics, graphic novels, cartoons and a variety of films and painting traditions.
Opening August 28, 2010, Hancock’s site specific, immersive installation A Better Promise at the Olympic Sculpture Park continues his imaginative tale. The new work features a 25 foot aluminum hand sculpture suspended like a mobile from the PACCAR Pavilion’s ceiling, along with wall drawings of colorful teardrops which will infuse the Pavilion with hues of vermilion, startling orange, yellow, traffic light green, brilliant blue and grape gum. Hancock permeates the hand with holes so the viewer will look both at and through the hand to the wall of tear drops.
As part of the work, Hancock issues a “call to color” by encouraging visitors to bring their own morsels of color – in the form of plastic bottle caps – to the park and drop them into the work of art. Nine large-scale “earthbound” vitrines have been placed on the floor in front of the hand sculpture. On the face of each of these nine containers, there is a teardrop cut-out where plastic bottle caps can be deposited by color. Visitors are encouraged to bring plastic bottle caps ranging in all shapes and sizes from detergent bottles, to clear water bottles to the black and white caps from drink bottles. The installation was curated by Marisa C. Sánchez, Assistant Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at SAM.
Born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, Hancock was raised in Paris, Texas, and received his undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University in Commerce, Texas. He went on to receive an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA in 2000. Upon graduation, he was granted a Core Residency at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and spent two years as a fellow in that program. Since 2000, he has lived and worked in Houston. His work was selected for the 2000 and the 2002 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has been exhibited in a number of solo shows both in the US and in the Netherlands, as well as in group exhibitions in New Orleans, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and at The Studio Museum in Harlem, to name a few. He is the recipient of an Artadia grant (2003) and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant (1999). He is represented by James Cohan Gallery, New York, and Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Dallas.
