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Maus Contemporary is excited to announce Travis Somerville’s upcoming exhibition The Line, the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

The work of Travis Somerville functions as a craft of anti-nostalgia and critical memory. In his exhibition The Line , Somerville continues his sharp and creative insistence on how images and material objects are never merely inanimate relics of a past far removed from our presents or our futures, tackling the current political environment through images and exploration of the recent Confederate Monument Takedowns.

The exhibition title, The Line, refers to the line drawn in the sand in front of each and everyone of us - the line we are willing to cross, or not. The Line also refers to the lineage of our political history of white supremacy and how that has shaped today’s political landscape. Somerville compels us to reconsider and repudiate the standard measure of America’s history of white supremacy and racism as a progressive narrative that has seemingly ended on an utopian note of post-race.

The work in The Line demonstrates a scripting of American history that forgoes this progressive wish fulfillment, a rhetoric of non-culpable hope. Instead, Somerville’s work intermingles visual and verbal references to the semiotics of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, the Age of Obama, the Age of Trump. As Somerville himself points out that his work complicates the sense of a collective memory about how race has shaped the political, historical, cultural, and social contours of America: “As I attempt to navigate the terrain between autobiography, history, and art, all sorts of collisions take place. It is these interesting moments and the inconsistencies that inform them that I try to capture in my work.”

Through the re-staging of old advertisements and newspapers, vintage money bags and cotton sacks, and the poignant juxtaposition of his drawing and painting against found photos, Somerville brilliantly entices the viewer to marvel over the aesthetic power of American culture’s everyday brutality and myopia.

Maus Contemporary is a contemporary art gallery and space dedicated to supporting creativity with a focus on experimental as well as issue-driven work. Through representing emerging, established, and internationally recognized artists, the gallery is committed to bringing a global perspective to contemporary issues and practices across the Visual Arts. The program consists of exhibitions, printed publications, and media outreach.

A rigorous gallery exhibition program, focusing on ten to twelve week long exhibitions, has become a staple of curatorial excellence in the South of the US, and the gallery has received critical attention from the press, including Art Forum and Art in America. The exhibition Mark Flood: FACEBOOK FARM was selected as one of three finalists for the AICA-USA Award for Excellence in Art Criticism and Curatorial Achievement in the category "Best show in a commercial space nationally outside of New York".
The gallery's mission is to offer a platform for experimentation in a culturally difficult environment through four to six gallery exhibitions a year in addition to curated projects and exhibitions abroad.

Maus Contemporary has released over a dozen publications so far, most recently monographs on gallery artists Leslie Smith III and Spanish artist Irene Grau, and is currently working on monographs of Catherine Tafur and Melissa Vandenberg.