Trenton doyle hancock biography meaning

By David Humphrey

If you tell yourself to do something, commandingly, can there be a good reason to resist? Are there advantages to having an unharmonious self? Trenton Doyle Hancock makes materially imposing artworks that stage a model of the self as a questionably disciplined collective. He uses cross-purposed behavior productively, both as a way to make paintings and as a metaphor for the self within history, dramatizing the ridiculous contingency of our lives.

In the painting With the Money I Have Left, 2012, Hancock pictures the head of a man trussed to a board so that his soft flesh and oversized mouth bulge from between tight bonds that are tacked to a board, secured by nails running along its sides like a stretched canvas. Densely crosshatched black lines articulate the soft forms of our hapless protagonist and echo the trusses crisscrossing his face, sometimes getting inside his mouth and teeth like dental floss. The self-binding d

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Return to Reality: Q+A with Trenton Doyle Hancock

For the past 12 years or so, Trenton Doyle Hancock has explored an invented mythological world through paintings and prints, sculptures and installations. In that world, good battles evil, as hybrid creatures called “Mounds”–part Neanderthal, part plant–fight to survive in the heart of a pristine jungle. They are beset by “Vegans,” the colorblind Neanderthals who seek to destroy them. The Mounds are for better or worse protected by a character called Torpedo Boy, who is, in Hancock’s words, “a superhero but also a screw-up.” As the stories unfold, Mounds are sometime killed but mostly manage, Vegans lose and regain their hateful ways, and Torpedo Boy (an alter-ego of the artist) does the best he can.

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For his fifth show at James Cohan Gallery in New York, ” . . . And then it all came back to me,” on view through Dec. 22, Hancock, who was born in Oklahoma City and r

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Trenton Doyle Hancock was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. 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’s prints, drawings, and collaged-felt paintings work together to tell the story of the Mounds—a group of mythical creatures that are the tragic protagonists of the artist’s unfolding narrative. Each new work by Hancock is 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.

Influenced by the history of painting, especially Abstract Expressionism, Hancock transforms traditionally formal decisions—such as the use of color, language, and pattern—into opportunities to create new characters, develop sub-plots, and convey symbolic meaning. Hancock’s paintings often rework Biblical stories that the artist learned as a ch