Travis Shaffer
travisshaffer@me.com
Bio
Travis Shaffer (b. 1983 Pittsburgh, Pa) received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Kentucky in May of 2010. Shaffer's work spans the genres of photography, book arts, graphic design and installation. Shaffer is a member of the Artist's Books Cooperative, a group of approx. 20 international artist wrestling with Print-on-demand technologies. Shaffer's work has been exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions, and present at art book fairs in major art centers in the US and Europe. SRO - Photo Gallery, Texas Tech University, will be hanging Shaffer's Eleven Mega Churches for solo exhibition in October of 2010, and Shaffer is currently working on his solo exhibition for Institute 193 in Lexington, KY titled Residential Façades, a stylistic appropriation of the works of Bernd + Hilla Becher, where he is photographing windowless façades in vinyl laden suburban neighborhoods.
Artist Statement
My work addresses the inter-connectivity of contemporary life through the discourse of visual culture. In my practice I re-contextualize visual and textual information gathered from sources both real and virtual. Using craft as a divisive tool, I re-present this research as art, integrating and aesthetic and typically seductive component into the presentation of said data. These works take form as mixed media sculpture, artist’s books, installations, performance and photographic prints. The resulting works blur the distinction between the formal art object and didactic representation.
Using this working methodology, I engage spatial and institutional communities, attempting to draw relationships between commercial and cultural industries. The production of this work seeks to call into question issues of access and diversity; land-use, suburban infrastructure, and auto-centricity; the nature of spatially dictated identity; and the subsequent formation of isolated communal brands.
My art practice draws reference from the artist’s books of Ed Ruscha, Allan Sekula, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Typologies, and data and mapping illustrations of artists such as Hans Haacke and Mark Lombardi. Citation and appropriation of such artists allows for the work to illustrate comparisons and distinctions between current and past notions of community and communal identities.