Travis Wyche's work is a reminder of the astoundingly limited understanding that even the greatest scientists have of human cognition. His art sends the ego packing on psychedelic pilgrimages, a smeared focus on the infinitesimal keeping the mind unhinged, turning itself inside out while transversing a psychosomatic event horizon beyond which lies new dimensions and new worlds: a cosmos defiant of definition. Embracing of paradox, massaging the ugly bruises of beauty, infesting interstices and never letting the senses lock into stasis; Wyche’s hallucinatory vision is truly transporting. Not content with fantasy or fancy, we neophytes are kept firmly rooted upon terra firma whilst being unrepentantly enraptured by reverie, wide-eyed gazing woolgatherers with stars and planets whirling about to the harmony of our hemispheres in perfect perpetuity. Our eyes have wings and we are typewritten tattoos of dreams. An odd precision filled with revolt, this work makes us more awake to our own space in our own world while being fugitives within them.
-Alejandro Magaña
August 2010
Oakland, CA

My interest lies at the interstice of logic and reason, of knowing and feeling. I am obsessed with the preposterousness of nothing, the terminal abstraction of everything, and the uninhabitable desert of the neutral. My current studio practice consists of rearrangements of all of the art-objects produced for a recent exhibition into piles, heaps, stacks, and lean-tos of “affective sense.” The first entropic pile slowly dispersed into 3 discretely structured totems - loosely referred to as fatigue, char, and concrete potential respectively - before being reunified as a singular theatrical autopoietic amalgamate. This exercise exemplifies a transitive phase of my practice: a movement out of the hyper-reflexive and meticulously analytical involvements of my collage work and into a state of ecological reverberation of a dissipated and integrated self. I am inventing methods at the periphery of comprehension to explore the potential of art after the Self, articulate a new eco-ontology of poetic-aesthetic creation, and dissect the philosophically disenfranchised artwork’s umbilical relations to the decaying corpus of modernity.
Up until now I have been concerned with the erection of fragile ‘epistemological canopies’ offering a pathetic semblance of shelter and an easily destructible armature. These assemblages of multiple arranged artworks were staged as totems of the interstice, referencing the fragility and contingency of human understanding and the inherent potential of art to instill confusion in the viewer. I am now moving beyond these concerns in order to relinquish the prospect that art must communicate something in favor of the possibility of not communicating, meaning, or understanding anything. In this case Art has become a pure potential that defies any pragmatic schematicization, a process of unnerving discovery and undelineating apertures that allows me to interrogate a tectonic shift in orientation, to foster a drive of pure will, to open up and unwittingly stumble upon. My practice is the unknown and the unknowable, a kind of non-knowledge that operates via an experiential hermeneutics of the filling void, illuminated emptiness, holistic nothingness, and selflessness/non-self.
To borrow a phrase from Robert Irwin, I seek to contribute to a ‘dialogue of immanence’ that coagulates at the peripheries of the disciplines in which the participants are united by a common drive into the potentials of the unknown rather than succumbing to the stifling pragmatism of their respective academic concentrations. I am moving, always moving, towards a process of compounded abstraction streaming from the primary plenum of experience through the reified relational patterns that dictate social behavior between disparate cogitos. While entertaining the notion that art exists not in objects but rather in ways of seeing – perception-as-perspective, in my opinion the quintessential subject of art – I strive to methodically dismantle the notion of the neutral, consensus, and the false dichotomy of everything-nothing in order to consciously construct altered states of being-becoming as a zero equation.