Borrowed and Not Returned
On view through June 28, 2022
Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art
Reston, Virginia
tephraica.org
“Borrowed and Not Returned” includes three recent and ongoing series by artist Travis Childers. Childers’ work is concerned with our society’s extractive relationship to nature, though he often approaches the topic with humor and a healthy dose of culpability as he acknowledges his own participation. In his new “Story Tellers” series, Childers employs miniature, model railroad materials to create landscapes that, despite their small size, imply the depth of the earth and the boundlessness of the sky. In contrast, Childers’ collage work in the Vegetation series presents opaque facades and coverings that create expansive fields of borrowed images.
Altered and constructed landscapes serve as anchors across Childers’ work, creating a common thread between a wide variety of human experiences. Underlying his practice is the sensibility that in our human relationship to landscape, there is something borrowed and not returned.
[Image: Travis Childers, Contemplating the Void, 2021. Photo credit: Luke Walter]
