Travis Somerville  American Rhetoric

through May 30




click above image to read the article An antidote to nostalgia  on Travis Somerville's work


The work of Travis Somerville functions as a craft of anti-nostalgia and critical memory. In particular, the American Rhetoric show at the beta pictoris gallery showcases a selection of Somerville’s new work that 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. 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 American Rhetoric 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, and the Age of Obama. 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 restaging 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. What more could one want from art?



click above image to read the article Racism? Art? Or both?  on Travis Somerville's work




click on any image to see available work







Mark Flood's exhibition FACEBOOK FARM at beta pictoris gallery
one of the finalists AICA's 2013
"Best Show in a Commercial Space Nationally" Award



beta pictoris is excited to announce our participation at this year's Pulse NY art fair
May 8 - 11   Booth# B8
Clayton Colvin, Charles Lutz, Leslie Smith III, and Travis Somerville






Don't miss beta pictoris gallery artist Clayton Colvin's New York exhibitions "Put Down Your Stars" at Margaret Thatcher Projects and "slow your instruments" at Launch F18, both exhibitions run through through April 26


Margaret Thatcher Projects is located at 539 West 23 St in Chelsea


click on above image for additional show info

Launch F18 is located at 373 Broadway
(between White and Franklin), 6th floor





beta pictoris is excited to announce our participation at VOLTA 10 in Basel, Switzerland
June 16 - 21
Clayton Colvin, Eugene James Martin, Leslie Smith III, and Odili Donald Odita








beta pictoris gallery's booth at the 2014 Volta NY art fair highlighting gallery artist Willie Cole's work
with a solo booth presentation of selected works, spanning 25 years of practice by the artist.





beta pictoris gallery       2411 Second Avenue North       Birmingham, AL 35203

© beta pictoris gallery 2014