TRAVIS MCEWEN:
A Crepuscular Garden

March 22 - May 11, 2024
Public reception: Friday, April 5, 5:30 – 8 pm

Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present Travis McEwen’s solo exhibition, A Crepuscular Garden. The exhibition will be on view from March 22 to May 11, 2024, with an opening reception on Friday, April 5th from 5:30 - 8 pm.

A Crepuscular Garden consists of twenty-three paintings made by McEwen over the past five years. This body of work speaks to Queer experiences of isolation and explores the ways in which escapism and worldbuilding can not only offer solace, but ultimately lead to new ways of understanding. In A Crepuscular Garden, McEwen thoughtfully constructs “futuristic” environments inhabited by humans and flora; they are nurturing spaces that beg to be explored.

McEwen has a deep interest in the visual aesthetics and motifs of science-fiction, which has long been a fertile site and a space to imagine other ways of being (the works of Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Ursula K Le Guin are of particular importance to him). We see this impulse, perhaps most dramatically, in the familiar, yet otherworldly light that permeates the expanses of desert, and other barren ecosystems, that McEwen depicts.

McEwen’s previous work consisted of desolate vistas without any sign of life; they were bleak landscapes restrained by desertification and ecological collapse. In A Crepuscular Garden we find both life and hope. Semi-arid, arid, and otherwise inhospitable spaces teem with flora, biodiversity and the promise that adaptation is both possible and inevitable. McEwen has turned away from bleak dystopias and toward something more optimistic. For him, Queer resilience can blossom like flora, and these paintings longingly embrace the nascent hope of what may not yet exist. Even in an environment of apparent collapse or abandonment, there is still space to care and things to be tended to.

Travis McEwen (b. 1985, Edmonton, Canada) lives and works in Santa Cruz, CA. He earned an MFA from Concordia University (Montreal, QC) and a BFA from the University of Alberta (Edmonton, AB). Recent solo exhibitions have been hosted by dc3 Art Projects (Edmonton, AB) and Katherine E. Nash Gallery (Minneapolis, MN). He was included in Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton, AB). He has participated in many group exhibitions with Latitude 53 (Edmonton, AB), Galerie La Centrale Powerhouse (Montreal, QC), and Owens Art Gallery (Sackville, NB), among others. He has an forthcoming solo exhibition in 2024 with Neon Heater (Findlay, OH). Additionally, he has work in the Senvest Collection of Contemporary Canadian Art. He was a lecturer at the University of Minnesota from 2014-2023 and currently is a lecturer at the University of California Santa Cruz. This is the artist’s first exhibition with Steven Zevitas Gallery.