From Pangs to Pangolins

2 June - 14 July 2018

Overview

Christopher Chiappa, JooYoung Choi, Llyn Foulkes, Zoe Hawk, David Hockney, Cheyenne Julien, Mike Kelley, and Nathan Margoni

"The pangolin is an actual creature that seems to be the stuff of childhood myth. It bears a resemblance to an armadillo and a lizard, but is neither. It also seems to be prehistoric—a living fossil. I swear I've seen this creature attached to essays on dinosaurs. Maybe it's a baby dragon-thing. Pangolins also would fit right in with descriptions of cryptids and other mythological beasts. The artists in this show are pangolins.”

-Trenton Doyle Hancock

From Pangs to Pangolins includes an intergenerational selection of artists, with works ranging from the early 1980s to present. Each artist explores the theme of adolescence and play (concepts central to Hancock’s own artistic practice), while drawing from a wealth of symbols and narratives from childhood's various hard-fought rites of passage.

The works in the exhibition explore aspects of each artist's own beginning—a productive, scary, magical time—and embrace this transformative period of development to engage with the anxious, out-of-place, dream-like spaces of childhood imagination, and the rhythms of their subsequent retracings.

About the curator:

For almost two decades, artist Trenton Doyle Hancock has been constructing his own fantastical narrative. Part fictional, part autobiographical, Hancock’s work pulls from personal experience, art historical canon, comics and superheroes, pulp fiction, and myriad pop-culture references, resulting in a complex amalgamation of characters and plots that possess universal concepts of good and evil, light and dark, and the gray area in between.

Hancock was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions. In 2014, his exhibition Skin & Bones: 20 Years of Drawing was presented at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and traveled to Akron Art Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; The Ringling Museum of Art; The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum; The Savannah College of Art and Design; The Weatherspoon Museum; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania; Olympic Sculpture Park at the Seattle Art Museum; Fruitmarket Gallery; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

In 2019, his work will be the subject of a solo exhibition, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Works