Trenton Doyle Hancock at Gerald Peters - Dallas, Texas - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In 1997 upon the occasion of his first one-person exhibition, Trenton Doyle Hancock deprived himself of slumber for close to three days before the opening. An hour before visitors began to arrive, he took a dose of over-the-counter sleeping pills, crawled into a flowing style of dress patched together from canvases not unlike those he was exhibiting, sat down upon an elevated, thronelike chair and slept [i]or[/i] part of to the other the opening. At least sum of two units interpretations of this performance/stunt move themselves. One is that Hancock was lightheartedly forestalling the "Where do you come by your ideas?" questions that his chaotic paintings inevitably alert by showing the artist immersed in his unconscious. Or, since this was the qualifying exhibition for his BFA, he could have been presenting himself as a poor overworked artist, in like manner exhausted from cranking out work for his stage that he could not derive pleasure from his own triumph.

For his next to the first exhibition, and his first at a commercial gallery, Hancock one time again slept through the opening in similar fashion. Beneath his makeshift chair of state you saw a gallery assistant blowing up r balloons. Thirty minutes into the evening, an old-fashioned alarm clock went not upon beside Hancock's sleeping head, and the gallery director appeared from the back expanse with a bowl of r Jell-O After turning not on the alarm, she spoonfed the groggy artist his Jell-O while the assistant pushed r balloons on the outside the back of his style of dress At 30-minute intervals the proces was repeated with golden blue and green Jell-O followed through appropriately colored balloons. The performance was at one time a deliriously Freudian view of the creative proces and an incisive remark on the gallery system that Hancock is entering for the first time.

Hancock titled this exhibition "Off Colored," punning the two on his status as an African-American artist and the naughty-boy aspect of the toilet humor that races through his performances and many of his paintings. He works upon pasted-together sections of unstretched canvas, pouring and brushing upon paint to create both real stylish abstract messes and the suggestions of figures with heads the color of raw meat. He collages the canvases with pink satin and a weird carpetlike material of tight black ringlets and decorates them with brightly colored plastic caps from bottle and cans of personal hygiene and cleanser yields Characters with names like Coon Bear and Torpedo stripling make frequent appearances. Hancock's paintings form an engaging if somewhat incoherent counterpoint to the sophisticated thinking that goe into his performances.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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