A Portion of That Field...
Charlie James Gallery is proud to exhibit the work of Travis Somerville, fresh off his spectacular show Dedicated to the Proposition at the Otis College of Art & Design’s Ben Maltz gallery in the fall of 2009. CJG will be partnering with the Catharine Clark Gallery of San Francisco, CA to jointly exhibit the work in the Otis show with openings a handful of evenings apart in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We will post more information in coming weeks regarding the show.
A Portion of That Field… is a solo exhibition of San Francisco based artist Travis Somerville organized by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco. The exhibition presents a new body of work including painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. The exhibition title refers to Abraham Lincoln’s historic Gettysburg Address delivered during the Civil War: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” In this speech, Lincoln asks the nation to honor its fallen by challenging its citizens to fully realize and achieve “…a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
With this body of work, Somerville explores the complex inheritance of a nation trying to live up to Lincoln’s challenge of being a nation not divided, but truly “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The artist is interested in investigating the tension and contradiction in America’s realization of equality and freedom for all between the numerous examples of the nation’s success manifest in Obama’s election and first 100 days and the nation’s failure evidenced by the enduring and shameful aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Travis Somerville was born in 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia to white civil rights activists—an Episcopal priest and a school teacher, and grew up in various cities and rural towns throughout the Southern United States. The geography of his upbringing is important – growing up in the south during the 1960s, a period of immense social upheaval, has deeply informed the narrative content of his work. His work simultaneously tries to reconcile his own Southern Christian upbringing and the tumultuous racial politics of 60s with the more progressive but better concealed racial divisions of today.
Somerville studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and at the San Francisco Art Institute. Select solo exhibitions include Another Song of the South at University of Georgia, Athens; American Cracker Too at Alfred C. Glassell Jr. Exhibition Gallery, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, and New Work at University of Houston, Texas. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions including the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling exhibition In the Spirit of Martin Luther King: the Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Whiteness: A Wayward Construction at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California, and Lincoln: Man, Myth, and Memory at the Amistad Center for Art and Culture in Hartford, Connecticut. His work is included in the permanent collections of the di Rosa Preserve: Art & Nature, the Achenbach Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Laguna Art Museum, and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. He has garnered critical attention in numerous publications including Art in America, Flash Art, Kitchen Sink, and The Washington Post.
Installation
