Trenton Doyle Hancock

Born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, Hancock grew up the son of a Baptist minister in the semi-rural town of Paris, Texas. At university, he studied illustration, then drawing and painting, and was initially uncertain whether to pursue cartoon illustration or fine art as a career. At that point, he recalls, ‘I formulated a mission statement. The idea was to have a painting project in which I could freely jump between modes of production and maintain a set of characters that inhabit the work’.

All Hancock’s mature work has been driven by this mission statement, and is produced in the context of an epic, ongoing saga which turns autobiography into mythology in a classic battle between good and evil. On one side are the peaceloving Mounds, the illegitimate progeny of prehistoric apeman Homerbuctas and a flower meadow. Mounds are covered in black and white fur, are rooted to the ground, and ooze moundmeat, a pink substance suspiciously reminiscent of Pepto-Bismol. On the other side are the evil vegans, a race of inbred descendants of Homerbuctas’s legitimate children, jealous of the Mounds’ relationship with their father. Due to generations of inbreeding, Vegans have strange physical mutations and have lost the ability to see in colour. They gather together underground and attack Mounds whenever they can in order to bleed them of moundmeat, which they convert into tofu.

Hancock’s narrative is not subject to the constraints of linear time, but unfolds episodically, the artist moving backwards and forwards in the histories of his characters to develop stories around them. In the section of the narrative presented in this exhibition, our hero is St Sesom, a free-thinking Vegan minister, a distant descendant of Homerbuctas, who begins to dream in colour. In one dream, it is pointed out to Sesom that Mounds and Vegans are descended from the same father and need not be enemies. Sesom is commanded to help other Vegans become human again by being friendly to Mounds and consuming their moundmeat as meat rather than tofu so that the Vegans might ‘regain strength, stature and spectral happiness’.

Sesom’s story is told through large collaged paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture and incantations writ large on the Gallery walls. Hancock’s work is a submersive experience, his theatrical installations banishing pre-conceived ideas about art while thrusting the viewer literally and figuratively into his mythic drama. He seeks to absorb everything - including the space in which he exhibits and the audience he exhibits it to - into his created environment, using language to drive the story and the audience’s understanding of it, while also seeing words as key visual components. He makes his narrative dominate and control its surroundings by physically writing it out on the walls.

Hancock’s saga is exuberant, subversive and curiously beguiling. It is presented through a variety of cultural tropes and visual styles, the artist mimicking comic-strip superhero battles and medieval mystery plays with equal panache. His mythical drama unfolds in an obsessively detailed, candycoloured world that owes something to Hieronymous Bosch, something else to Max Ernst and a great deal to the teeming visual imagination of its creator.

Born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, Hancock grew up the son of a Baptist minister in the semi-rural town of Paris, Texas. At school, he was interested in video games, comic books and drawing, and combined two of these by working as a cartoonist for first the school and then the Texas A&M University newspaper. He studied illustration at Texas A&M University, then drawing and painting at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

A major publication accompanies the exhibition. It includes a new interview with Trenton Doyle Hancock by Thelma Golden, Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs at The Studio Museum Harlem; an essay on Hancock and American art by respected US writer Eleanor Heartney, and new writing by Trenton Doyle Hancock.

Trenton Doyle Hancock
The Wayward Thinker