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21/3/2008

Cult of Color

AMOA-Arthouse - The Jones Center, Austin

Notes on a Collaboration

The exhibition is presented in conjunction with Cult of Color: Call to Color a new ballet commissioned by Ballet Austin and created by visual artist Trenton Doyle Hancock, choreographer Stephen Mills and composer Graham Reynolds. Ballet performances will be held at the AustinVentures StudioTheater at Ballet Austin, 501 West 3rd Street, April 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, with matinees April 6, 12 and 13, 2008.

The exhibition traces various aspects of this original, cross-disciplinary collaboration among three Texas-based artists – Trenton Doyle Hancock, Houston; Graham Reynolds and Stephen Mills, Austin. Within the Arthouse gallery walls the artists’ inspirations will reveal themselves, and the form and structure of the work, its very essential nature, will be exposed. Additionally, the exhibition will explore the complexity of translating an artist’s visual world into a compelling, innovative performance including original music and dance. The exhibition will present four environmental installations derived from ballet scenes: the Forest, the Cave, the Miracle Machine and the Battle. The galleries will include Hancock’s paintings, notes, drawings, and formal and informal sketches that inform the design and concept of the production, as well as artworks that inspired the backdrop curtains, stage props, and costumes. Hancock will also create site-specific installation elements at Arthouse. Reynolds’ entire score will be available and his sound elements will texture the artistic spaces. Mills’ working process will be represented digitally via computers as well as through video collage.

This unique project originated with Stephen Mills, Ballet Austin’s Artistic Director, who invited Trenton Doyle Hancock and Graham Reynolds to collaborate with him to create a new ballet based on Hancock’s ongoing visual narrative. Beginning with Hancock’s artistic vision for the ballet, this partnership evolved over the course of two and one-half years. Reynolds composed the music as well as the sound environments, and Mills created the unique choreography. Hancock also designed the costumes, sets and properties which include a backdrop curtain and fabric made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia.

The Story
Cult of Color: Call to Color is a chapter in Trenton Doyle Hancock’s ongoing artistic mythology. Hancock’s paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and individual performances work together to represent his characters, the Mounds, the Vegans, and other imaginative creatures, who are at the center of the artist’s unfolding operatic narrative. Hancock’s characters and their dilemmas embody themes of life and death, the struggle between good and evil, love, authority, spirituality and moral relativism. Biblical in scope, mythological in content, and comic book in style, the story tells of a battle fought between the gentle Mounds and the mutant Vegans. In this chapter of Hancock’s story we are introduced to the Vegan minister, Sesom (Moses spelled backwards) who, like his namesake, offers the possibility of salvation to the unruly and war-like Vegan followers through the intervention of a loving character, Painter. And, just as all the Vegans appear to convert to the goodness of “The Cult of Color,” one antagonist, Betto, resists. The ensuing violent struggles for power between these forces of will are at the core of this episode of Hancock’s tale. Balancing moral dilemmas with wit and a musical sense of language and color, Hancock creates a painterly space of psychological dimension.

Public Programs at Arthouse
March 22, 3:00-5:00 pm at Arthouse
Panel discussion with Trenton Doyle Hancock, Stephen Mills and Graham Reynolds
Conducted by Robert Faires, Arts Editor, The Austin Chronicle

April 24, 7:00 pm at Arthouse
Cult of Color: Call to Color String Quintet featuring
Graham Reynolds
Presented by Arthouse in collaboration with Refraction Arts +Fuse Box Festival

Free and open to the public

About the artists
Trenton Doyle Hancock, visual artist
Trenton Doyle Hancock, the 2007 recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist prize from the Studio Museum in Harlem, has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including at the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennials. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Hancock has also shown internationally at the Lyon and Istanbul Biennials. The 2007 solo exhibition Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Wayward Thinker was at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland and traveled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Stephen Mills, choreographer
Known for his innovative and collaborative choreographic projects, Stephen Mills has works in repertories of national and international dance companies. In his inaugural season as Ballet Austin’s artistic director in 2000, Mills attracted attention with his world-premiere production of Hamlet, hailed by Dance Magazine as “…sleek and sophisticated.” For his debut in New York City’s renowned Joyce Theater in 2005, The New York Times wrote that Mills can “…innovate by using the body in ways that depart from balletic convention.” Mills was awarded the Steinberg Award, the top honor at Quebec’s Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur International Choreographic Competition, for One/The Body’s Grace. With Cult of Color: Call to Color, Mills continues to establish his ground-breaking approach to dance creation.

Graham Reynolds, composer A composer, bandleader, pianist, and drummer who works constantly in theater, dance, film, concert halls, and nightclubs, Reynolds appeared on the international stage in 2006 when he was selected by Richard Linklater to compose the motion picture soundtrack to the animated sci-fi feature film, A Scanner Darkly. His other compositions include four symphonies, two operas, a violin concerto, more than a dozen one-movement string quartets and countless chamber music pieces. Recent commissions include Ulysses for the Austin Children’s Choir and The Method Gun for The Rude Mechanicals theater group. With his performing group The Golden Arm Trio, Reynolds has composed and produced three award-winning albums of cross genre experimental music. Reynolds is also co-artistic director of the Golden Hornet Project which commissions and produces concerts of new work.

Support This project is supported by The Berman Family Foundation

Season Sponsors: Austin Ventures, InterContinental Stephen F. Austin Hotel, Jones Asset Management, Neiman Marcus, The Rosemary Haggar Vaughan Family Foundation

Additional support provided by: Arthouse at the Jones Center is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant for the Texas Commission on the Arts and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes a great nation deserves great art.

For more information on Arthouse contact Virginia Jones at vjones@arthousetexas.org or at tel. (512) 453-5312.

Opening march 22, 2008

Arthouse at the Jones Center
700 Congress Avenue - Austin, Texas

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