Trenton Doyle Hancock: Real Biography | "Exclusive" | Art21

[TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK: REAL BIOGRAPHY]

[Houston, Texas, June 2002]

In this image here, we have Mound #1, "The Legend,"

being attacked by Vegans, who are the bad guys.

And what they're doing is ripping his fur off

and ripping into his skin.

And they're going to take the mound meat

and dump it down the toilet bowl, and convert it into tofu.

I've just matured in a lot of ways,

and the things that were... I felt were super important to me as a young guy,

they're kind of trivial now.

[TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK: ...AND THEN IT ALL CAME BACK TO ME]

And, I think that's where this show is decidedly different than

some of the past efforts.

If the conceptual material in the work isn't about Mounds or Vegans,

or some story that I've made up,

what's a story in my life that's a real story?

[James Cohan Gallery, November 2012]

The floor tile in the painting "The Den"

is a motif that I grew up with in my grandmother's home in Paris, Texas.

My grandmother moved out of that house years ago,

so I kind of forgot about it,

and there weren't many pictures.

I was up in Ithaca speaking at Cornell last year.

A graduate student had me over to his place

and we were listening to music, and I was like,

"Hey, where's your restroom?"

And he pointed my upstairs, and I went and was just knocked aback

because I looked down and on the floor was that tile,

which I hadn't seen in so long.

So it was like a sensory punch.

So I got out my phone and I started taking pictures of this guy's bathroom.

I learned how to draw on that floor.

She would throw, you know, paper and some crayons over there.

She would watch the 700 Club and sew on her quilts,

or gossip on the phone while I was down there, on that floor.

So I was very close to it, and internalized it.

The paintings kind of have slowed down,

I was just doing a lot of drawings and

kind of taking it easy and decompressing,

and kind of catching up with life.

I went through a break up.

Like, there were births. There were deaths.

There were these very real things that caused me to reevaluate

what's worthy of my time in the studio

when time is such a limited thing.

And I don't know how these things cosmically line up,

but that tile was revealed to me at the exact right time.

Like, wow, I was looking for a new ground to stand on

and I found it in this tile,

so that pattern is a truth.

It's like I could have easily not gone to the guy's house and seen it.

I'd already dealt with the Mounds and the Vegans for,

I don't know, eight years, or nine years even.

It was about this subculture that wanted to regain their humanity through color.

I'd done a ballet based around it.

So, in some ways, seeing the characters come to life in front of me and dance,

was, like, "Okay, how much further do I want to go with this kind of characterization?"

The very personal things were in the old work,

it was just really codified and it was, like, hidden.

Maybe it's time to start dealing with real-life stuff.

So that same kind of reflexive thing that was going on with the work before--

that was me and these codified characters--

then became me and my real biography.

It's like, okay, deal with real stuff,

and, just see where that goes.

So I'm figuring out new filters,

and ways to figure out what's important,

what do I follow up on.

But, I know that most of it is going to start with the self,

and that's why the show is titled,

"...And Then It All Came Back to Me".

This idea of self portraiture started to become the new character.