About the artwork:
This work is part of a series of dye-on-velvet paintings that explore the eros of observation. Each painting draws as much from the artist's emotions as still-life documentation, and each image shares a reference point—the intimate lives of mushrooms. The tactile silk surfaces hold the same delicate, easily crushed tension as the underside gills of mushrooms. Each mushroom is poised in both specific and metaphorical gestures, while the parallax effect of each surface denies a fixed, strictly frontal interpretation. In each work, there is a connection between the mysterious lines of communication in the fungi kingdom and queer intuition, including the notion of "gaydar." Unfolding like mushroom blooms across a forest floor, the puffs of spores in these paintings are messages to one another—traveling and intoxicating their environment and opening up an awareness of desire.
About the artist:
The subjects of Travis Boyer’s textile-based paintings reside in crucial moments of collision, self-definition, or reconciliation. An interface between the sensual and spiritual, Boyer’s silk velvet works respond to our approach and movement thanks to subtle changes in texture, depth, and color that result in a delightful diversity of surfaces within their materiality. For instance, the velvet has been pressed into a chrome sheen in some places yet deepened into dark fields of dye in others. Boyer’s paintings demand our participation—asking us to constantly reconsider their presence due to texture, angle, light, and air—and reward the viewer who engages with them in real life.
Travis Boyer was born in 1979 in Fort Worth, TX, and lives in New York, NY. He graduated with an MFA from Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, NY (2012).
He has mounted solo exhibitions at Peter Kilchmann Gallery in Paris, France (2024); Noon Projects in Los Angeles, CA (2023); Signal Gallery in New York, NY (2021); False Flag in New York, NY (2019); Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France (2018); Palais des Beauxs-Arts in Paris, France (2015); Johannes Vogt Gallery in New York, NY (2014); and Galerie Fons Welters in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2013).
His works reside in the collections of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia; the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine; the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine; and the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH.
In 2021, Boyer took part in the Texas Biennal. He was among the first artists awarded the Fire Island Artist Residency. Boyer’s work has appeared in Artforum, The New Yorker, Vogue, and New York Magazine.
Specs:
This dye-on-velvet painting's tactile surface holds the same delicate, easily crushed tension as the underside gills of mushrooms.More
- Framed: 41.6 x 29.6 x 1.6 in.
- Signed
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