Travis Boyer

Travis Boyer, having collaborated with Donnie Cervantes, produces unique works that ingeniously incorporate figurative photographic work, silk and cashmere embroidery, and dying techniques. Photographs are first taken, they are printed on silk using a reverse cyanotype process, and then an embroidered design is added with a color dye on the cyanotype photograph. The artists merge the mechanical process of photography with the handmade processes of dying and embroidery. Though the work is based on photography, the handmade additions lend a painterly quality, as well as a fantastic aesthetic, to the composition. Subject matter also plays a role in the magic of the image lending a feeling of otherworldly mystery depicting mostly solitary individuals in ethereal and metaphysical landscapes seemingly referring to a kind of loss of innocence. The work investigates a unique territory within the processes of the mechanical and the handmade, creating an amalgam of mediums that treads a beautifully distorted line between portraiture and allegory.

Travis Boyer was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1979. He is a New York based artist who holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School for Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He has exhibited at Participant Inc., New York; John Connelly Presents, New York; Evas Arche, New York; Dumbo Arts Center, Brooklyn; SOMA Arts, San Francisco; Galleria Glance, Torino, Italy; Piso 51, Mexico City; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He was awarded the Fire Island Artist Residency and Boyer has been invited as guest lecturer and performer at Yale MFA program; RISD, Providence, RI; CCA, Oakland, CA; and MICA, Baltimore, MA.