Shows You May Have Missed: Trenton Doyle Hancock at James Cohan
Trenton Doyle Hancock, Step and Screw: The Star of Code Switching, 2020, acrylic, graphite, plastic tops, and paper collage on canvas, 84 x 84 in. © Trenton Doyle Hancock 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d'Heurle.
Trenton Doyle Hancock’s two-part exhibition Something American at James Cohan’s Tribeca and Lower East Side locations was an impressive, arresting, and inventive entryway into the artist’s mind: a tumultuous world of conflict and resolution. Some of the artist’s works in Tribeca dealt blatantly with racial issues, such as Step and Screw: The Star of Code Switching, featuring a robed Ku Klux Klan figure, hinting at the fraught issues people of color deal with when balancing their identity and what it means to be Black in America under both a national audience and their own internal microscope. Others, such as the large Bringback Condiments: Mustard, Mayo, and Special Sauce, and Bringback Condiments: Ketchup, were visual feasts aided by the fearless use of materials including acrylic, graphite, plastic tops, faux fur, and paper collage on canvas. Dozens of characters known as “Bringbacks” populated these works, whose peeking heads and bloodshot eyes undulated in a dizzying array ready to jump off the canvas.
Trenton Doyle Hancock, Bringback Condiments: Ketchup, 2020, acrylic, graphite, plastic tops, faux fur, paper collage on canvas, 90 x 132 in. © Trenton Doyle Hancock 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d'Heurle.
On the Lower East Side Hancock’s drawing skills were at the forefront as a new chapter of his graphic novel The Moundverse, Chapter 2: Veganism, unfolded through large ink on paper drawings. Relating stylistically to some of the best underground cartoonists of the 1960s and 70s such as Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and Robert Williams, here Hancock continues his inward and often opaque critique of society using his Torpedo Boy second self, a non-human vegan species, and the police. This Dada-esque narrative comes to a climax as Torpedo Boy swallows gobs of meat from a food truck to gain strength to destroy the Vegans and packs a visual punch, with detailed line work and wildly inventive use of the comic panel. I’ll have what he’s having.
Trenton Doyle Hancock, Trenton Doyle Hancock Presents The Moundverse, Chapter 2: Veganism, 2020 Pages 21 & 22 from suite of 19 framed drawings, ink on paper, each page: 24 x 36 in. © Trenton Doyle Hancock 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d'Heurle.
