Trenton Doyle Hancock: the Re-Evolving Door

Race, class, identity, social justice—Trenton Doyle Hancock’s work is concerned with many of the pressing issues of our time. Never didactic, Hancock’s emphasis is on imaginative, wild, even silly imagery, which nevertheless conveys critical subject matter. Hancock gets his point across through cartoon-like characters and seriocomic narratives. Maintaining a balance between illustration and abstraction, he manages to be both formal and funny. At CAM, audiences will be able to see both early and recent work by Hancock, and realize a consistency of vision and an evolution toward greater complexity and control. Many of his early characters remain in his present work, black-and-white striped figures who entertain ideas of good and bad, protagonist and villain. They convey a striped humanity, if not a striped human condition. Hancock has added bottle caps and other found materials to his surfaces, as well as text, which serves as both label and image. Conflict is everpresent in Hancock’s narratives, sometimes on an operatic scale, often subversively expressed—a Looney Tunes of dramatic situations that nevertheless speak to perpetual American dilemmas.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website