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Congratulations to Trenton Doyle Hancock on the opening of I Made a Mound City in Miami Dade County, on view from November 16, 2019 through February 8, 2020 at Locust Projects in Miami, Florida. The exhibition will open with a public reception on Sunday, November 17 from 1:00-3:00 pm. Locust Projects will host a reception with the artist during Miami Art Week on Tuesday, December 3, 2019 from 7:00-9:00 pm.
Hancock tells the story of the Mounds (gentle hybrid plant-like creatures) protected by Torpedo Boy, and their enemies, the Vegans (mutants who consume tofu and spill Mound blood every chance they get). These narratives--told through paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, video and installation--explore good and evil, authority, race, class, moral relativism, politics and religion, as well as making unapologetic nods to comic books, illustrations, animations, horror films, and toys.
Hancock's Moundverse is an epic and fantastical creation myth he started at age 10 with the creation of Torpedo Boy, a well-intentioned, deeply flawed, alter-ego super hero who attempts to save kind and gentle Mounds from evil Vegans. While his storytelling follows the classic comic book character trajectory of conflict, struggle and overcoming, Hancock also reflects poignantly on our humanity and trying to make sense of the wrong's in the world.
Visitors enter the exhibition through Locust’s Storefront, which the artist has designed to mimic a commercial toy store displaying shelves of the artist’s custom-designed Moundverse Infants. The dolls, depicting various characters from Hancock’s epic narrative, are “infant” incarnations of Torpedo Boy, Undom Endgle, Bring Back, and Soul.
Once in the Main Gallery, visitors are greeted with wall designs that shout out the exhibition’s title in bold letters. Always at play, Hancock arrived at his title, I Made a Mound City by re-arranging of the letters in Miami Dade County. The focal point, is a massive, ceiling-height sculpture of The Legend, Mound #1. Visitors can enter the structure through its fabric pelt-like cape entrance to view The Color Crop Experience, an animation of the artist encountering The Legend in the forest. The exhibition also features early hand-drawn pages from Trenton’s forthcoming 400-page graphic novel, The Moundverse, videos and animations, and a pop-up comic book store in the Project Room.
Born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, OK and raised in Paris, Texas, Trenton Doyle Hancock
earned his BFA from Texas A&M University, Commerce, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. He was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, at the time becoming one of the youngest artists in history to participate in the prestigious survey. In 2014, his exhibition, Skin & Bones: 20 Years of Drawing, at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston traveled to Akron Art Museum, OH; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, VA. In March 2019, a major exhibition of his work, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass, opened at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. He currently lives in Houston, TX.
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