April 29 – June 10, 2018
Notions – Stillnessness (My Grandfather’s Pots)
Trevor King is a visual artist based in Queens, New York. Working between sculpture, video, and installation, King’s undertakes open-ended, immersive projects that ruminate on the endurance of the human spirit in the face of time and mortality. While often referencing specific personal histories from his upbringing in the rust belt, King’s work engages larger contemplations of work, value, and our quest for meaning.
King received a BFA from Slippery Rock University (2011) and a MFA from the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan (2015). King also studied as an exchange student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland (2010). King has been a resident artist at Touchstone Center for Crafts, Ox Bow School of Art, Haystack Mountain School, and Sculpture Space NYC. In 2014, King was awarded an International Institute Fellowship from the University of Michigan to work under British sculptor Antony Gormley. In 2015, King’s work was awarded an Outstanding Student Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center. He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally STILLNESSNESS is his second solo exhibition in New York City.
Photographies: © Math Monahan
TRACING HIDDEN TREASURES by Silvia Benedetti
Notions by Trevor King is an ongoing project that focuses on memory and translation as a form of dialogue. It consists of the production of abstract ceramic sculptures based on a series of drawings made by King’s grandfather Roy Mellott and given to King over seven years, until his passing. Mellott produced these hundreds of sketches after valuable objects appraised on the television show Antiques Roadshow. He wanted his grandson to replicate and sell the pieces for the same amount of money that the original objects were valued at in the show, thereby providing financial support for King to survive and succeed as artist in what he understood as the art world.
For the past twenty years, the American television program Antiques Roadshow: Discovering America’s Hidden Treasures, broadcast on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), has been a popular series on antiques and collecting, with an average of 8.5 million viewers each week. On it, local antique owners in small to midsize cities in the United States bring items to be appraised by experts. Segments are organized by period, from ancient to modern, and medium. Provenance, history, and value are all discussed. It is a real-life example of how people can turn old objects (trash) into treasure by discovering their true value. For King’s grandfather, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, a program like Antiques Roadshow must have been one of his few entry points to high art, so his focus on reproducing the objects and giving them as gifts to his grandson seems natural. Obsessively sketching any object that drew his attention on the show, Mellott produced a remarkable series of drawings characterized by the use of suggestive continuous lines that trace each object’s silhouette. His delicate work deserves attention of its own. The drawings, made on blank pages of crosswords books, were evidently executed by someone without formal art training, and therefore Mellott’s work could easily fit in the category of outsider art.
King, a trained ceramist, made his pieces after the drawings using both hand-building processes, which gave him the freedom to make asymmetrical forms, and occasionally the wheel for creating particular forms. All of the sculptures are monochrome, but some look like soft clay due to their drying processes and others are such vivid monochrome they look as if they were hand painted. King plays with the appearance of each piece, simulating the different stages of the ceramics process—even though they are finished sculptures, he creates the illusion that the pieces are unfired, seemingly to translate the simplicity of Mellott’s drawings into clay.
Mellott intended for the drawings to be made into three-dimensional sculptures, so in a way he is the architect of the work. However, his lack of traditional drawings skills made it almost impossible for King to render them in definitive sculptural forms. Because of this, King made several versions for each drawing. Though his work has a conceptual component, the traditional ceramics techniques give it a craft component as well.
The links between contemporary art and outsider art have been explored in many important exhibitions and catalogues. Traditional artists have been inspired by the works of outsider artists since the twentieth century; in many cases they fail to produce works that are meaningful beyond pure stylistic imitation, but King’s project is different. Notions can be seen as an exchange with his grandfather mediated through art, a dialogue inflected with affection due to their familial ties and shared life experience. The project juxtaposes two fundamentally different approaches to art that some how complement each other.
There are three levels of translation operating in Notions. First is Mellott’s interpretation of the objects on Antiques Roadshow: a digital image from mass media translated into the traditional medium of drawing. The second translation occurs when King creates three-dimensional ceramic renderings of the drawings, and by extension, the objects from the television show. The last process of translation is the one that occurs when the viewer encounters the work of King next to the drawings of his grandfather and tries to synthesize the matrix with the objects inspired by it. These transformations are the hidden treasures.
Silvia Benedetti is an independent curator, currently the Manager of Collection and Exhibitions at the Bronx Museum. Some of her previous work experience includes curatorial positions at Cisneros Latin American Art Initiative at Hunter College, Dia Art Foundation, and Fundación Gego. Her writings have appeared in exhibitions catalogs and publications such as Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, and Tráfico Visual. She holds an MA in Art History from Hunter College.
