Trenton Doyle Hancock’s latest show at Dunn and Brown Contemporary, Work While it is Day, For When Nigh Cometh No Man Can Work, is primarily an exhibition of the artist’s paintings and drawings, which are presented on white walls –  large canvases hung on their own and smaller work framed and grouped in clusters. There is also a wall that the artist has painted black, on which he has written a sentence, hanging a few smaller works against the unconventional black gallery wall and placing a sculpture in the room’s center.

Trent Doyle Hancock, Faster, 2010, Mixed media on paper; 9 x 11 1/2 inches. (Courtesy Dunn and Brown Gallery)

Hancock’s drawings are very strong. The decision to place a few on black walls is very clever. It helps set a tone, and in the black space, it is easier to discover intimacies in the work that might otherwise be lost in such a large gallery. Hancock has a very sensitive hand when considering a delicate variety of mark.  In his paintings, the artist is very responsive to surface and at times obsessive with the images.  Hancock is less self conscious in his drawings, and many of his images – like his nipple squeezing, gelatinous tub of goo – reveal monstrous, self-depreciating humor.  In the drawings, he is able to fully explore the details of his world and place himself in often comical situations.  The paintings possess similar interesting moments, and the color and texture often relate the grotesqueness of rotting food. Despite the often jarring subject matter, all this work seems primarily concerned with texture and form, and paintings and drawings alike resolve themselves in the same heraldic way.  Only in the drawings, the artist is relaxed, playful and inventive, thus there are more surprises.

Work While it is Day, For When Night Cometh No Man Can Work, 2010. Installation View #2 (Courtesy Dunn and Brown Gallery)

For what is primarily an exhibition of paintings and drawings, it is refreshing to see an artist engage with the gallery space as much as Hancock does in this show. However, while at Dunn and Brown, I heard many visitors describing the Trenton Doyle Hancock show as an “installation.”  The word “installation” is getting thrown around a lot lately by artists, galleries, and a public who are desperately attempting to describe artwork and spaces in hip renegade contemporary terms.  Interpreting the word loosely, we could say that every exhibit we see has in fact been “installed.”  Museum and galleries consider how the art will fill the space and how viewers will encounter it. Yet with all the “installation” work that went into the recent Luc Tuyman exhibit at the DMA, never did I hear any visitors describe it as an “installation”.

Trent Doyle Hancock, Work While it is Day, For When Night Cometh No Man Can Work, 2010. Installation View #3 (Courtesy Dunn and Brown Gallery)

True installation art in a contemporary art sense is when an artist utilizes the entire space, the walls, the ceiling and floor to create one piece, one unified experience so that it becomes difficult to separate the art from the space.  When entering into the gallery/space viewers are entering the piece itself and actually interact with and become part of the artwork. Trenton Doyle Hancock’s work is installed in the space and is not an installation.  It is hung on the walls at the correct museum height and is spaced around the gallery predictably to enhance a viewer’s experience of it, just as any gallery does. Yet it is obvious that his work, although part of a compelling series, is meant to be seen as separate paintings and drawings. This clever hanging only reemphasizes the individuality of each piece of the artist’s work.

Image at top: Trent Doyle Hancock, “Torpedo Boy, Heiren Hazo,” 2010 (detail). Mixed media on paper; 6 1/4 x 10 inches (Courtesy Dunn and Brown Gallery)