Travis Somerville

THE CAC MÁLAGA PRESENTS HOMELAND NO SECURITY, TRAVIS SOMERVILLE’S FIRST SHOW AT A EUROPEAN MUSEUM

The Centro de Arte Contemporáneo of Málaga is pleased to present a new exhibition featuring American artist Travis Somerville. On 17 February the CAC Málaga will open Homeland No Security, a show curated by Fernando Francés that presents nine pieces by the artist, including his most recent work. Somerville’s goal is not just to address current affairs but also to offer a reflection based on the stories suggested by certain objects which act as symbolic elements. To this end, he uses different formats and materials in his works: wood, fabric, objects like a gas mask, ropes, flotation devices, flags or references to the Ku Klux Klan. The artist feels driven to use his art to share the hidden stories, the ones no one wants to talk about, the ones that inspire feelings of shame and make us look the other way.

17 February–7 May 2017

Talking about the exhibition Homeland No Security at the CAC Málaga, Travis Somerville (b. 1963, Atlanta) explains, “I really started referencing the refugee crisis in my work after visiting Spain and other parts of Europe and witnessing how differently it is dealt with there as opposed to the US. Some of the work also references the border issues with Mexico and the US, with race being a predominant factor”. The artist invites us to reflect on the relationships between human beings, exploring the complexities of racism and starting a discussion about oppression, primarily in the US, and colonialist attitudes abroad.

For Fernando Francés, director of the CAC Málaga, “Travis Somerville is a totally engaged artist who breaks with convention by challenging consciences. He is not afraid to voice his nonconformity with the American dream that the United States sells to the rest of the world. He delves into and analyses the problem of social imbalance, caused by the mere fact of belonging to one country or another when those countries are separated by insurmountable barriers of prejudice. It’s a lottery: your luck depends on when and where you were born. The world is full of people who are fleeing with nothing but a feeling, the hope of finding a place where they will be treated as equals, as human beings. Somerville pricks our consciences with his critical voice, stating the obvious truths we try to avoid and shaming those who choose to forget history. Who emigrated in the past? How are we involved in our present? And what are we going to achieve in the future?”

Travis Somerville (b. 1963, Atlanta, Georgia) was brought up in a very liberal family, something rare at the time. Atlanta was a focal point of the African-American civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1950s and 60s, in which the artist’s parents participated. His father and mother, a pastor and teacher, were committed to social causes. Travis attended a large number of demonstrations, including anti-Vietnam War protests, from a very young age. He briefly studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, finally settling in San Francisco where he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, CA. His large-scale oil paintings on paper mounted to canvas incorporate collage and present images of political and cultural icons associated with the history of the south.

Homeland No Security contains a total of nine works, including four oil paintings, one watercolour, three graphite drawings and one installation. The oldest work on display, Great Expeditions (2009), helps to put the show in context. Hope and historical guilt intertwine in this 238 x 355 cm oil painting. Divided into two parts, the work shows the US flag and an ocean clogged with rubbish. In the centre, a boat christened with the word “Greed” in Arabic. Aboard the vessel, a Ku Klux Klan member perches on the edge of the prow; his hands are bound with a rope and he is blinded by the absence of eyeholes, unable to see his own actions. The sunflower sprouting from his head is a nod to Anselm Kiefer’s 1996 work Tournesols and establishes the link between the heavenly and earthly realms, the human and the divine, God and man—the connection between the microcosmic and macrocosmic worlds. On the left, a disembodied hand reaches out with a pen to puncture an oil derrick that seems to have contaminated the entire scene. On the right, a baptism is interrupted by a floating log with a severed noose tied around it. And, completing the scene, we see a burning tyre whose black smoke should obscure the work, but Travis Somerville pushes it out of the frame so that everyone can see the shameful acts committed.

Comin’ Home (2016) and Nevermind (2016) are two closely related works. The former, painted in acrylics, presents two separate worlds, the real and the idyllic, with the latter represented by rose-hued floral pattern wallpaper from a mansion. The ship depicted here was copied from an oiler that Somerville saw in The New York Times; it is not an iconic element but rather a general reference to seafaring vessels. The ocean on which it rolls precariously drips down onto the title REFUGEES WELCOME, which has been erased, rewritten and subsequently crossed out. Beside these words is the head of a black man, an image Somerville retrieved from a photograph of a civil rights protester in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, where demonstrators were attacked by firemen and police. The dripping water trickles all the way down to that idyllic and seemingly immutable world; it represents the intrusion of the refugees’ reality in the ideal world they long to join and which they eventually reach in one way or another.

In Nevermind (2016) we see the same ship, this time rendered in oils. With effort we can make out words that read NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS HERE’S THE REFUGEES, an obvious nod to the controversial cover of the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. The album was released in the UK on 28 October 1977 and immediately caused an uproar over the use of the vulgar term “bollocks” in the title. Lawsuits were filed to censor the name and prohibit the album’s sale in record shops. The work is a new interpretation of refusal to conform to the status quo, combining music, represented by an album cover, with Travis Somerville’s subject matter.

For The Raft (2016), the artist sought inspiration in a masterpiece from art history and used it to address his most frequent themes: refugees, rafts and people who are forced to surrender their lives and fates to the sea. Painting serves as a witness of history. The Raft of the Medusa, painted by French artist Théodore Géricault in 1819, caused a great scandal in its day, telling the whole world of a tragedy that exposed the worst side of the political regime which governed France at the time. It told the tale of a shipwrecked vessel and the survivors’ desperation to be rescued.

In 1817, two of the expedition’s survivors published a book entitled The Wreck of the Medusa. Their story created an indescribable stir in France, where gazettes, pamphlets and prints soon began to depict the horrors of the ordeal in lurid detail. In the midst of this outraged uproar, a 28-year-old artist named Théodore Géricault decided to immortalise the episode in a large painting. The painter wanted to create a realistic composition, and he began by meeting with the two shipwrecked men, using their testimony to sketch his first outlines. The finished canvas was unveiled at the Paris Salon that opened on 25 August 1819. Although it was hung very high and bore the generic title Shipwreck Scene, the work caused an immediate sensation. Naturally, everyone recognised it as a depiction of the Medusa tragedy. Conservative critics pointed out supposed artistic errors, the obscene realism of the work and the horror it inspired in viewers, all far removed from the ideals of classical beauty. Liberals, on the other hand, saw the painting as a condemnation of the new regime and its apathy, a metaphor for a great national shipwreck. Somerville’s sources included another historic work, Watson and the Shark, painted by John Singleton Copley in 1778, a few years before Géricault’s composition.

Travis Somerville’s oil on canvas consists of eight sections joined together; seven form the raft, while the eighth appears alone at the top. He placed a blood-red oil rig to the left of the main mast, from which a black man’s head hangs, right in the middle of the composition. This is not a coincidence, for Géricault and Copley also placed a black sailor at the centre of their works: this was a clear statement of principles by both painters at a time when the struggle to end black slavery and the slave trade was intensifying. The Raft (2016) contains other recognisable allusions to the dramatic story, like the wave on the left which hit the craft at the worst possible moment, a bottle of alcohol—perhaps alluding to the inebriated state of the captain and sailors at the time of the wreck—and a wounded man in profile (an old anonymous policeman who was attacked and shot) representing the raft’s survivors. The solitary section at the top is part of the composition, occupying the same spot where a castaway is desperately waving a handkerchief, hoping to be spotted and rescued, in Géricault’s work. Somerville only leaves us the fluttering fabric as a symbol of succour. To the right of the composition are letters imitating the famous HOLLYWOOD sign but altered to read PECKERWOOD, a derogatory slang word for a poor rural white person. Travis Somerville has used the theme of the wreck of the Medusa in his work on several occasions; for him, it is a social and political event reinterpreted by contemporary art.

The only installation in the show, War Paint (2016), will enter the permanent collection of the CAC Málaga when the exhibition is over. It consists of a wooden raft on which Somerville has draped the US flag between two masts. A glove suspended in mid-air hangs from the flag, seemingly striving to reach the flotation device below with an anguished gesture. We also see coiled ropes and beside them a painting on the raft of a Cherokee Indian (the same figure that appears in his 2016 work This Sporting Life) and a Spanish flag. This piece was inspired by the story of the Spanish Franciscan friar Junípero Serra (Mallorca, 1713–1784), who led evangelising missions and established the Catholic Church’s influence in what is now the state of California. Even today he remains a controversial figure and is not accepted by some members of the California community, who claim he uprooted their native culture and way of life. Somerville’s intention when designing this work was to link Spain with California and spark public interest by associating significant historical events that wove the intricate tapestry of relationships on which our culture is founded. This friar is the only Spaniard with a statue in the National Statuary Hall of the Capitol Building, the seat of legislative power in the United States, where the most illustrious figures in US history are represented.

This Sporting Life, 2016, is a bridge between his works War Paint, 2016 and The Raft, 2016. In there he repeats the iconography that appears in both works, the cherokee and several allusions to Géricault’s work as the ship sail of the Raft of the Medusa, and a body that falls to the sea. Quite gathered by a boat stagnant for different garbages, crossed by a tree.

Finally, the exhibition presents three graphite drawings on recycled cotton feed sacks bearing the stamp BEMIS A EXTRA HEAVY SEAMLESS, which the artist cut open to obtain a larger pictorial surface. These works do not form a triptych, but all three were made simultaneously at the beginning of this year and Somerville considers them a series. In Exiled we see a frightened young girl staring off into space and clinging to her life jacket. The work also incorporates epaulettes from the jackets of Soviet soldiers. Invasion depicts another girl, this time staring directly at us, with a bag hanging from one hand and, higher up, a Soviet-issue gas mask. In the last piece, Let’s Make a Deal, a girl holds up a placard like a protester, gazing unflinchingly at the viewer, on which we read the words POST TRUTH, which summarise and convey the message emanating from Travis Somerville’s entire oeuvre. This fragile, defenceless child looks society in the eyes and says: POST TRUTH.

With Homeland No Security, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo of Málaga expands on one of its most frequent exhibition themes: social denunciation through artistic expression. Social inequality and border-related problems are addressed from a critical, analytical perspective that shows spectators our contemporary social reality. The museum has hosted several other exhibitions in this same vein, featuring the work of artists like Jason Rohades (Tijuanatanjierchandelier), Kimsooja (To Breath – Zone of Zero), Subodh Gupta (The Imaginary Order of Things), Jesús Palomino (Creative Inquiry Preparing an Educated Electorate with the Will of Social Justice rather than Simply Self–Interest) and Lawrence Weiner (Forever & a Day).

Travis Somerville was born in 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia, EEUU. His work has been included in numerous museum exhibitions: The University of Georgia, Athens, GA; University of Houston at Clearlake, Houston, TX; de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, CA; Florida A&M University, Tallahasee, FL; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Charles Wright Museum, Detroit, MI; The Bass Museum, Miami Beach, FL; Frederick Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. His work is included in numerous Museum collections, including SF MoMA; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego CA; the 21c Museum in Louisville, KY; the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA; the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.