What is real? asks a toy in the shape of an animal.
Real is something that happens to you, the Skin Horse says. You become slowly.
It takes a long time.

(All parentheticals are the artist’s)

***

Travis Morehead whittles down utilitarian wooden objects into skeletal forms, slowly removing the trappings of representation and leaving the contours of sustained attention and touch.  Through these residual effects—a gate section whittled into something bone-like—Morehead brings his pieces to the brink of coming undone, but breaking points are avoided by an attuned and careful hand. For the artist, the awareness of an object’s weak points also becomes the responsibility to preserve them.

(reduction, not for erasure,
but for new clarity)

The objects’ joints and points of attachment, the integrity of their materials, are understood, acknowledged, and newly articulated through the process of reduction. What were once objects intended to transport or to hold; to act as an armature or extension; to demark or delineate, are made corporeal, their functionality carved away, replaced with a heightened sense of agency. Morehead leaves the hardware, along with subtle signs of repairs or finishing (bolts, hinges, traces of paint or stain), as his gestures weave a conversation with the former, unknown hands that labored on and used these objects in their prior states.  

(there is the love of things
and then there are things being loved)

Through the slow, reductive process of whittling, Morehead demonstrates a sort of reverence or quiet devotion, sustaining attention as one might hope, bringing something new into being. By paring his objects down beyond their former serves, Morehead moves them past representation or symbol. If prescribed function is also abstraction, blanketing and flattening the particularities of an object, Morehead’s pieces have become newly “real.” In this way, former meaning dissolves, along with power, once imposed in the guise of pre-inscribed design. The object becomes closer to an independent body, “turning a symbol into some semblance of a person,” detached from the trappings of prior form.

(attention works against alienation, by taking a type and drawing out an individual)

Through repeated action, Morehead’s objects are made thinner in form—coins pounded into tiny bowls, a bone carved into the shape of an ear. They act as reminders of edges, of interfaces, wherein an “interface can be a conduit,” and a space for meaning made new. Attention, made visible in the effects of a careful gesture, repeated over and over again, works against alienation. It preserves the shape of a thing, but rubs away its artifice.

(tending —
to tend toward —
to attend —
to look after —
to return —
to till —
to work the edge of what's here)

Bio:
Travis Morehead is a Chicago based artist. Travis was a Fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists' Residency, and has attended residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, and Monson Arts. Travis has exhibited at venues including Haus Wien (Vienna, AT), Warbling (London, UK), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME), AS220 (Providence, RI), among others. Travis graduated with a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA from Northwestern University.