The Ringling
Sarasota
Until September 13, 2015.
Studio Museum Harlem. until June 28, 2015
The Toymaker, 2013.
About:
Over the past decade, Trenton Doyle Hancock has become known as one of the most inventive artists at work in America today. He is best known for his extended series of visual work that develops the intricate personal mythology of the Mounds and the Vegans, two diametrically opposed universal forces that play out the archetypal battle between good and evil. His work provides the space for him to develop complicated visual narratives with many plots and sub-plots, and this personal cosmology has been explored in works on paper, painting, installations, and even a ballet.
Cabbage, 2013.
Hancock is an avid collector of action figures, a passion that began for him in childhood. This exhibition, EMIT: What the Bringback Brought, will be the first phase in realizing a new series of action figures and dolls as well as a film in the guise of a television commercial promoting these characters. According to Hancock in this commercial, “the product that I would be selling [would]not only [be the] toys but sensibilities from a another time, a time when toys were better, when horror films and children’s fantasy entertainment was better.” So, through this project, he will circle back to his childhood fascinations with horror films and action figures, fascinations which have carried over into adulthood and influenced his multi-faceted oeuvre.
Goobers Intrusion, 2006 (shown in Studio Museum).
Trenton Doyle Hancock was selected by a national panel of museum curators as the 2013 recipient of the Greenfield Prize awarded in conjunction with The Hermitage Artist Retreat. This work in this exhibition has been made possible through that award.
This exhibition is in partnership with the Greenfield Prize at the Hermitage Artist Retreat.