Travess Smalley
Born in 1986 Huntington, WV
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
To describe Travess Smalley’s work, one could employ a number of terms—painting, photography, sculpture, collage, digital, physical, virtual—without fully capturing what the artist achieves. In his own words, his practice aims at creating an experience “where the viewer’s visual vocabulary just draws a blank and they can no longer distinguish the digital from the real.” For his “Vector Weaves” series, Smalley employs a hybrid digital/analog method that he has called creating “Feedback Loops.” First printing vector-based patterns onto paper with different degrees of transparency, the artist then layers the prints and scans them into one image. The resulting abstract, colorful collages are enlarged and printed on vinyl, then stretched over aluminum frames. By using Photoshop as an extension of his material artmaking, Smalley is able to archive the different processes that he applies to individual images, enabling them to be used again and creating a rich platform for quotation and alteration of his past works.
CV
Travess Smalley completed his BFA at the Cooper Union, New York, USA (2010) and studies at the Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA.
Selected solo exhibitions include: "Travess Smalley", Foxy Production, New York, USA (2015), "Travess Smalley", Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna, Austria (2014), "Vector Weave", Higher Pictures at The Armory Show, New York, USA (2014) and "Compositions in Clay", Higher Pictures, New York, USA (2014).
Selected group exhibitions include: "What is a Photograph?", International Center of Photography, New York, USA (2014), "Liquid Crystal Palace: Recent Works with Jeremy Blake", curated by Michael Connor and Nate Hitchcock, Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, USA (2014) and "Hitchcock", Honor Fraser, Loas Angeles, USA (2014).
Travess Smalley, Vector Weave - Oct 8 2014 Action 1 over Action 3 applied to Oct 1 Photocopy Scan 06, 2015, UV print on stretched vinyl, custom aluminum stretcher bars, 244 × 178 cm, SMAL0002