Vegans at Contemporary Jewish Museum

[Guest guest]

In the Beginning There Was the End, In the End There Was the

Beginning

2008

Mixed media installation

Commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum

Courtesy of the artist, James Cohan Gallery, New York, and Dunn and

Brown Contemporary, Dallas

 

For the past fifteen years, Trenton Doyle Hancock has been creating

an epic story that is biblical in nature and scale. For this

exhibition, he made In the Beginning There Was the End, In the End

There Was the Beginning, in which he recounts an early episode of

this story. Hancock tells the violent origin story of his main

characters, the Mounds—half-human and half-plant creatures that are

almost destroyed by their jealous half-siblings in a bloody

massacre. In the end, the halfsiblings get swallowed into a lower

realm, eventually becoming the Vegans, a new race and Hancock's

antagonists in this master narrative. The surviving Mounds, the

protagonists, are rescued and replanted by their loving father

Homerbuctus.

 

Hancock's text, drawn directly on the wall, tells the story while

the violent attack of the Mounds is illustrated in the wallpaper

which serves as a backdrop. The large canvas and the drawing on the

far wall depict the attack in more detail, while the smaller works

document the next series of events in this unraveling story. Hancock

sees parallels between his mythology and Genesis—the garden setting,

betrayal, the use of the tree to corrupt and kill, and the murdering

of siblings that gives way to a race in need of redemption.

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