Travis Wyche is a Chicago-based artist and experimental musician utilizing a variety of media to fashion a practice infusing institutional critique with phenomenological disorientation and a self-reflexive pedagogy. His practice has most recently taken the form of intricate collage works, sound installations, conceptual sculptures, typewritten concrete poems, and hand painted 35mm slides for multiple amplified Kodak Ektagraphic projectors. He received a BFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and is currently attending the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute Chicago.
Statement
I am formally trained as a painter, I willingly adopt the title of “painter,” and I am interested in parlaying with the discourses besieging the status of contemporary painting. However, my raison d’être lies within the obsession for meaning cascading throughout all of academia, and indeed also observable in numerous primitive, esoteric, mystical, or otherwise delegitimized constellations of study. I seldom make “paintings” in the sense of applying oil or acrylic-suspended pigments to canvas or panel with brushes or palette knife, preferring instead to explore my ideas with derelict material approaches. Mattresses left to rot in stank allies, obsolete audio-visual equipment, and the heavily oxidized acid-laden pages of ageing text books have always seemed fitting signifiers for a society of lavish novelty and imprudent waste. I assemble this domestic and institutional detritus into objects and experiences evoking suppressed mythologies, the depersonalizing scrutiny of science, and the spiritual ecstasy of transcendence, utilizing whatever medium and psychology of mind best suits the focus of the particular project I’m focusing on. By cross-correlating theoretical philosophies of mind, hypotheses of cognitive science, and psychological perspectives from the art historical cannon with the eye-level perspective of anatomical, botanical, and geological images – or any other image that could be seen to arouse associations of epiphenomena in the universe or meta-states of the subject – I attempt to collate and compare my flickering signifiers as being equally problematic in their permeation of meaning and potent in their poetic potential to describe the current state of the subjective ego in the oscillating universe. I try to stay limber with my theories, to maintain and transmit a universal skepticism (rather than antagonism) that I find so intrinsic to my being of and in this world, while also sustaining a neutrality (not to be confused with indifference) towards the ethical and political associations of my works. A formally nuanced methodology constructs the framework to impart my oscillatory theoretical modus operandi, and so I keep as much expressive gesture and ornamental mark-making out of the work as possible. I intend my work to be difficult, to manipulate expectations and extend alternative mechanisms of understanding, but hopefully the viewer will also derive some pleasure from the aesthetic absurdity of the unorthodox juxtapositions as they were certainly most enjoyable to discover and assemble.
Statement
I am formally trained as a painter, I willingly adopt the title of “painter,” and I am interested in parlaying with the discourses besieging the status of contemporary painting. However, my raison d’être lies within the obsession for meaning cascading throughout all of academia, and indeed also observable in numerous primitive, esoteric, mystical, or otherwise delegitimized constellations of study. I seldom make “paintings” in the sense of applying oil or acrylic-suspended pigments to canvas or panel with brushes or palette knife, preferring instead to explore my ideas with derelict material approaches. Mattresses left to rot in stank allies, obsolete audio-visual equipment, and the heavily oxidized acid-laden pages of ageing text books have always seemed fitting signifiers for a society of lavish novelty and imprudent waste. I assemble this domestic and institutional detritus into objects and experiences evoking suppressed mythologies, the depersonalizing scrutiny of science, and the spiritual ecstasy of transcendence, utilizing whatever medium and psychology of mind best suits the focus of the particular project I’m focusing on. By cross-correlating theoretical philosophies of mind, hypotheses of cognitive science, and psychological perspectives from the art historical cannon with the eye-level perspective of anatomical, botanical, and geological images – or any other image that could be seen to arouse associations of epiphenomena in the universe or meta-states of the subject – I attempt to collate and compare my flickering signifiers as being equally problematic in their permeation of meaning and potent in their poetic potential to describe the current state of the subjective ego in the oscillating universe. I try to stay limber with my theories, to maintain and transmit a universal skepticism (rather than antagonism) that I find so intrinsic to my being of and in this world, while also sustaining a neutrality (not to be confused with indifference) towards the ethical and political associations of my works. A formally nuanced methodology constructs the framework to impart my oscillatory theoretical modus operandi, and so I keep as much expressive gesture and ornamental mark-making out of the work as possible. I intend my work to be difficult, to manipulate expectations and extend alternative mechanisms of understanding, but hopefully the viewer will also derive some pleasure from the aesthetic absurdity of the unorthodox juxtapositions as they were certainly most enjoyable to discover and assemble.
For more please visit www.TravisWyche.com
Singular Divination Amidst Tripartite Apothecarian Counsel
Book-Clippings and Ink on Found Paper
6"x9"
Compost
Book-Clippings on Found Paper
6"x9"
Untitled [A Singular Orchestra]
Book-Clippings on Book Page
~3"x5"
The Big Bounce
Waxed Leather, Raw Wool, Laytex
Variable Dimensions
Event-Score
Magnetized Tape and Tape Recorder
Variable Dimensions
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