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BEYOND THE COVER
TRENTON DOYLE
HANCOCK
Trenton Doyle Hancock. Photo by Michel Wells
Juxtapoz and Przm bring you Beyond the Cover, an inside look at each issue's cover artist, giving a further look into some of the best creatives working today. Each Beyond the Cover will be presented on Przm.com, a new platform that is the easiest way for artists to create shop-ready sites in minutes.
This month, we feature the works of Trenton Doyle Hancock.
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WELCOME TO
TRENTON
Meet THE MAN BEHIND THE ZEBRA
INTERVIEW BY GABE SCOTT   //  PORTRAIT BY WILL MICHELS

Born in Oklahoma and raised in a racially turbulent Paris, Texas, Trenton Doyle Hancock has been weaving a complex fabric that laces elaborate fantasy into personal and familial folklore, while examining his own cultural and philosophical identity. From a young age, driven by his love for comic books and graphic novels, as well as the raconteur’s template they provide, his youthful fascinations have evolved into a fully realized alternate universe. Centered around creatures known as The Mounds, who co-exist with Hancock’s own alter-ego, Torpedo Boy, as well as other characters representing significant people in his life, he combines Southern roots and religious upbringing to comprise the narratives omnipresent in his practice.

Trenton Doyle Hancock - Self Portrait With Tongue
Self Portrait With Tongue

His personal mythology is rife with subplots and character crossovers, presented on an extravagantly theatrical scale. Life, death, afterlife, rebirth, transcendental contemplation, racism, love, hate and metamorphosis are all prime players in his great odyssey. To make this possible, Hancock’s artistic practice employs a series of formal conclusions as metaphors, and messages are meticulously honed so they can be threaded through his visionary needle.

Over the past year, his major drawing retrospective, Skin and Bones: 20 Years of Drawing has toured museums around the country, while other aspects of his oeuvre and practice have been on display around the world. Film, performance, sculpture, writing and dance are all material in his monumental and ever expanding tapestry.

Gabe Scott: Your drawing retrospective has traveled for the last 12 to 15 months. What has that done for you in terms of self reflection, the progress of your work, and ways you see all the individual works interacting as a whole? Do you feel differently about certain pieces?
Trenton Doyle Hancock: I was very happy to have the opportunity to see all that stuff at once. A lot of those drawings had never been in the same room before. Walking through the show helped me objectively analyze my intentions as an artist—discovering myself anew. It enabled me to step back and make important connections about scale, material and content. That was one of the most valuable things I’d taken away from the show. It’s funny—right now, in the past week or two weeks, I’ve discovered what the drawing show has meant to me in terms of how to carry on.

Trenton Doyle Hancock - I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation
I Want to Be at the Meeting After the Separation
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Seeing myself retrospectively has made me realize that I really like the "aesthetic of the timeline" or the collapsing of time into one space. I like seeing things I've made from different eras in the room at the same time, or all on a page. Currently, in my studio, I’m compiling information from my past, bringing it back together, and creating compositions. Like memory quilts or something like that—really digging into these specific areas of my past graphic life and exploiting them.

Having had time to let things sink in with your museum retrospective, do you think the hierarchies and mythologies that have evolved over the last 20 years have reached a point of stasis? Do you reflect on that period of work as a chapter that has closed or has reached some conclusion?
Quite the contrary. I feel that living with the drawing retrospective for the past year has stirred any stagnancy in my studio. Being able to re-visit old characters, tropes, and drawing methods has reactivated my studio in a way I never thought possible. I fell in love with my characters all over again.

What were some of the comics you were really inspired by when you were young?
Like most kids, I was into the standard characters, Spider-Man, The Hulk, Batman, etc. When I was around the age of 15, I found a graphic novel called Havoc and Wolverine: Meltdown. It's one of my favorite comics because it was a darker retelling of the Marvel mythos. There was lots of sex and violence, and the treatment of the story was very grown up. I imagined that if superheroes actually existed, then this comic portrayed that reality. Also, instead of being drawn, the panels were painted in oils and watercolor. I feel that my instincts towards paint and painting were definitely affected by this comic book.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: Real Biography

You were largely raised by your grandmother, yes?
I spent a lot of time with my grandmother when I was young, and my mother and my aunts. There were a lot of older women who helped raise me.

How do you feel that influence has helped to shape you as a person and your creative drive?
Well, one thing is that I actually listen to women’s opinions; it’s not something I have to try to do, but it's the way I was conditioned. There’s a strong voice and an amazing amount of knowledge coming from the women who raised me. This isn’t the case for everyone’s life, but I just happened to have been in a situation where that was the case. A lot of my most influential teachers, art teachers, especially, were women who were great artists and great thinkers, and they helped to set me on the right path early on. Right now, I’m developing and drawing a character named Undom Endgle. She is the first female superhero in my pantheon, and she’s the most powerful being in my Moundverse. In fact, she was once a Mound, and evolved into a warrior goddess.

Trenton Doyle Hancock - Moundmeat Shower Unit
Trenton Doyle Hancock - Lateral Movement Hit The Ground Punching
Moundmeat Shower Unit (left) Lateral Movement Hit The Ground Punching (right), 2012

How did the Mounds actually come to be, and how was that mythology created?
Before it developed any kind of personality, form came first. The Mound form came to me when I was an undergrad, investigating how to paint the figure. I was trying to determine what my place was with figure drawing or figure painting. Coming from a comic book background, I had a certain understanding of how to approach character development and the proper ways to depict a figure, but I had to vary my approach to mark-making in order to make the paintings I wanted to make. As I painted more, I relearned a lot of things about how to use materials, and about the history of painting. I was also doing a lot of psychological archeology on myself.

In the spirit of reduction, I began erasing or tearing off the arms and legs of my figures. What I was left with were bowling pins, and I felt a deep empathy for these seemingly helpless forms. As I examined issues of race, identity and inclusion, I began to add these signifiers (namely the black-and-white stripes) to my figures and the painted environments that they inhabited. The Mounds started as bowling-pin prisoners wearing striped outfits and evolved into fantastical forest-dwelling creatures. The Mound was the result of my search for a simple yet complex form, a receptacle for universal ideas. For a while, I was creating characters that acted as loners. It only seemed right to have them all interact with one another at some point. In this way, the mythology grew organically.

Where did the conflict between the Mounds and Vegans originate?
The concept of the Vegans came from my need to address an immediate problem. I was living with some vegans in grad school, and the domestic situation was getting a little intense. Let's just say, our ideologies and worldviews were clashing. I started drawing these horrible pictures of them to make myself feel better about the situation. They were the first two Vegans in my work.

“
In the spirit of reduction, I began erasing or tearing off the arms and legs of my figures. What I was left with were bowling pins, and I felt a deep empathy for these seemingly helpless forms.
Trenton Doyle Hancock : Various Ossi-Units and Good Vegan Detritus #6, 2007
Various Ossi-Units and Good Vegan Detritus #6, 2007
Trenton Doyle Hancock : The Essence Of Vegan Purity
The Essence of Vegan Purity, 2006

Do they know that?
They probably do. I’ve not talked to them in 15 or 16 years. But yeah, they helped me out a lot and didn’t even know it. I kept drawing the Vegans after I graduated, and eventually I gained distance from that initial trauma. The negative feelings turned into something I could use in my work. Vegans became the opposition to the Mounds. Vegans are little, bony, vaguely humanoid goblins that travel in groups. The Mounds are huge furry heaps that are plump and ripe. The contrast of these two characters appealed to me, and thusly, their inevitable opposition was set in motion.

What was your family’s religious background?
I was raised Baptist and Pentecostal.

Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Former and the Ladder or Ascension and a Cinchin', 2012
The Former and the Ladder or Ascension and a Cinchin', 2012


Trenton Doyle Hancock - I don't believe He Brought Me This Far to Leave Me, 2014
I Don't Believe He Brought Me This Far to Leave Me, 2014
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Then I gather that oral tradition is a pretty big thing for you. How has that been passed down through your family and manifested in your work?
I am currently in a traveling museum show called Radical Presence: The History of Black Performance, which was curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver. I chose to re-stage a performance I originated in 1998 where I dressed as a Mound, ate Jell-O, and farted balloons… it was crazy and fun. It had been more than 15 years since I activated this performance, and my thoughts about it had changed dramatically. For the current show, I decided to augment the design of the performance, both adding and subtracting elements. This time, after I ate the Jell-O, instead of the balloons coming out, I actually sang a hymn that I learned in church. The performance itself is about oral tradition, and for me, it's a way to maintain a connection with the people who taught me. My grandma and my stepfather were the keepers of that sacred knowledge. Now that they are no longer living, I am one of the keepers of this knowledge. Merging my artistic concerns so transparently with my religious past felt almost sacrilegious and was unsettling for me. It ended up being a very serious and confrontational performance.

Do you think there are any aspects of your work that are distinctly Texan or specifically referential to where you grew up, live and work now, in Houston, that might be lost on people who are not familiar with the culture?
I think there’s something inherently Texan in my work or maybe the South in general—the folk narratives, oral traditions, issues of religion, specifically Christianity. I’d say a lot of Southern artists have to navigate through that. It’s part of my work, and I’d say it’s probably something I’m never quite going to figure out. I don’t know that anyone can truly figure those spiritual things out. Traditionally, Texans hold two institutions in high regard: church and football. There’s a kind of fanaticism that crosses over between the two arenas, where people tend to loosen their minds, bodies and spirits. I grew up in church, and I grew up playing football. I understand those structures, and maybe I help bring some of that to the art world. There’s a kind of passion that I’m interested in: I take the things that I think are usable and good about those ways of living, and hopefully, you can see that evidence in how I run my studio.

Plate of Shrimp, 2012
Plate of Shrimp, 2012
Give Me My Flowers While I Yet Live, version #1, 2010
Give Me My Flowers While I Yet Live, version #1, 2010

Do you frequently involve performance in accompaniment to larger-scale exhibitions? Or is it really on a case-by-case basis? How crucial is it to the narratives in your work?
The acting-out or role play of the narrative is very important to what I do. It attaches me emotionally to the subject. If I perform as a character, then I can believe in that character. Therefore, I can paint or describe with a certain amount of freedom, unhampered by guilt.

In relation to your admiration of comic characters, superheroes and the powers that define them, that’s interesting. Yeah, and again, I think it relates back to sports and the church in the sense that practice makes perfect—a ritual of memorized gestures one practices so that when you get out on the field, you’ll know or feel that kind of honed

Read the full Trenton Doyle Hancock article in the January 2016 issue of Juxtapoz. Order it here
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Trenton Doyle Hancock - A New Creature #1, I Don't Pretend to Love You, 2013
A New Creature #1, I Don't Pretend to Love You, 2013
 
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