John Connelly Presents is pleased to announce the debut solo exhibition of New York based artists Donnie & Travis. Working in collaboration, Donnie & Travis create photo based figurative works on silk that are embellished with textile dyes and silk & cashmere embroidery. Donnie & Travis's subjects are usually solitary or paired figures situated in pastoral or metaphysical landscapes. They gaze directly at us, hide behind tangled shrouds or interact with ambiguous geometric structures. Using the process of cyanotype, Donnie &Travis embed their subjects in a pictorial reality that begins and ends with a reflection on the body and it's physical indexes. By the time Donnie &Travis's subjects inhabit their framework, they have gone through three generations of mechanical reproduction. Already approaching drawing through this physical degeneration, the figures are then suffused with hand-made elements, washes of textile color and elaborately embroidered details. Embroidery is what holds the image to the canvases, as everything else becomes liquid dyes, skin, blood and vapor. Donnie &Travis’s work investigates a unique territory within their polar processes of the mechanical and the handmade, creating an amalgam of mediums that treads a beautifully distorted line between portraiture and allegory.
