Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present Travis McEwen’s solo exhibition, A Crepuscular Garden. The exhibition will be on view from March 22 to May 11, 2024.
A Crepuscular Garden consists of twenty-three paintings made by McEwen over the past five years. This body of work speaks to Queer experiences of isolation and explores the ways in which escapism and worldbuilding can not only offer solace, but ultimately lead to new ways of understanding. In A Crepuscular Garden, McEwen thoughtfully constructs “futuristic” environments inhabited by humans and flora; they are nurturing spaces that beg to be explored.
McEwen has a deep interest in the visual aesthetics and motifs of science-fiction, which has long been a fertile site and a space to imagine other ways of being (the works of Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Ursula K Le Guin are of particular importance to him). We see this impulse, perhaps most dramatically, in the familiar, yet otherworldly light that permeates the expanses of desert, and other barren ecosystems, that McEwen depicts.
McEwen’s previous work consisted of desolate vistas without any sign of life; they were bleak landscapes restrained by desertification and ecological collapse. In A Crepuscular Garden we find both life and hope. Semi-arid, arid, and otherwise inhospitable spaces teem with flora, biodiversity and the promise that adaptation is both possible and inevitable. McEwen has turned away from bleak dystopias and toward something more optimistic. For him, Queer resilience can blossom like flora, and these paintings longingly embrace the nascent hope of what may not yet exist. Even in an environment of apparent collapse or abandonment, there is still space to care and things to be tended to. | 
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