Anne Bujold: Tell me how you make decisions. With my students, I've often discussed your slowly evolving building and re-building process, the erasures, and the unrefined, but pleasing surfaces. But when do you actually know when to add, take away, or stop?

Travis Townsend: Well, that’s a really good question, and one that is often the most difficult to determine. Sometimes I add something new or create the overall shape fairly fast. These moments are exciting because it feels like progress. After much looking, though, many of these quick additions are removed, scaled-back or altered. These changes and erasures allow remnants of the creative act to linger.

A slow, wandering approach does this show justice. In a back corner, a dialogue on American fragmentation occurs between Travis Townsend’s reassembled wooden piece, Vessel of Manifest Density! (2nd Permutation) (2019), Timothy Robertson’s polyptych of an American flag on a garbage bin, and Vian Sora’s abstracted and emotional painting, Babylon to Babel (2020).

Townsend’s Vessel of Manifest Density! (2nd Permutation) floats slap-dash and multicolored on the concrete floor like an unmoored boat that looks like it easily could have been made out of popsicle sticks or skateboards, yet speaks as powerful symbol for historical (and present) American freedom. Boatcraft and American history has a multifaceted and complicated past (and present): with indigenous traditions of dugout and bark canoes, bull-boats and kayaks, to that of early Malali, Mandingo explorers of the Americas, fleets of Western colonizers such as Columbus as well as modern rafts of the Balseros from Cuba.

One corner of the gallery is anchored by Travis Townsend’s Vessel of Manifest Destiny! (2nd Permutation), whose crude construction underscores the dangerous naivete of its mission. This is a vessel of dubious buoyancy; one imagines it steadily taking on water as it lumbers into the open waters of decolonization.

The repetition and layering in Townsend’s sculpture are echoed in adjacent works, almost as if reflections on the surface of water: Skylar Smith’s palimpsest of the slow progression toward equal rights for women and Timothy Robertson’s four-part series depicting an American flag draped over a garbage bin with a water-like warping effect that mesmerizes at the same time it suggests its own dissolution.

Artist Happy Hour 10, Touchstone Center for Crafts, July 2020

Travis Townsend joins us to share his work and studio practice. Travis draws, builds, rebuilds, paints, and tinkers upon wood and mixed media sculptures in his Lexington, Kentucky studio. His process-oriented works evolve from sketches and travel through many transformations before being cut apart, reassembled, and reworked (sometimes many years later).

Travis Townsend also combines drawing and sculpture, creating sculptural forms covered with drawings. The forms themselves reach out to the gallery wall on which are hung more drawings. The sculptures appear to be machine structures built for inch-tall humans: micro-environments of a world unique and separate from our own. As a result, the wall drawings appear to be created by a sentience other than the artist's, further implying the sculptures are a product of an unknown culture and world.

Travis Townsend spoke to me about teaching university classes to non-art majors and the importance of teaching an artistic approach to students in all fields of study. His work during Pentaculum centered on a series of dead bird drawings and a space craft-ish sculpture that can be seen at the Eastern Kentucky University’s Chautauqua exhibition.

I’m in the studio at night tinkering with memories and thinking about the things that men build. Have we built good things? Am I building a good thing? Personal and artistic self-doubt? Well, kinda. But more importantly, I hope the work communicates a serious and intentional examination of the creative act and the nature of “building things” in general.

“View of the big nothing . . .” divided the room, forced a path around the meatiest component, and rewarded the viewer from every angle. By integrating the preexisting shelves along with the suspended gaze of the perched “God Bird”, Smith Townsend Collaborative achieved a Horror Vacui while still maintaining an inviting atmosphere through small details of surprise.

TRAVIS TOWNSEND’s large sculptural vessels appear to be part boat, part RV, part space ship, part ark. Tiny chairs and ladders occupy these vehicles, hinting at vague narratives of human cultures—past, present and future—in transition or possibly on the brink of extinction.

I've been collaborating with Brandon Smith for a bunch of years now..... Our individual works build on each other to strengthen a somewhat evolving narrative.

His large scale toy-like sculptures offer a mysterious and engaging archaeological playground for discovery and narrative. Townsend skillfully walks a thin line between low-craft and high design, whimsy and irony, and he does so in such a way as to create truly unique objects which take on an implied life of their own.

With a look that is equal parts worked-over and undone, Townsend’s pieces have been altered three times (some over the course of a decade or more) and this reworking results in sculptural objects that resemble multiple things at once. “Vehicle of Strange Conception (2000-2012)” is one such piece, in that it suggests disparate objects: a head-mounted camera rig, as well as a kind of post-apocalyptic Barbie house.

Travis Townsend's newest sculpture, an ambiguous, peanut-shaped vessel, rests on the floor of Doppler PDX. Created during the Kentucky-based artist's recent residency at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, this vessel is made from students' discarded wood scraps, suggesting a representation of a yacht or a crude spacecraft.

A mysterious, stylishly out-of-date object — maybe a chunk of homemade stereo equipment or cool art of a certain age, like Lee Bontecou's mothership gun ports from the late 1950s — is being hauled by 13 small wooden cows toward a rough charcoal sketch of a bird's skull, mounted low on a gallery wall; a teensy, enigmatic ladder reaches up to it, as if for a miniature muralist.

“Another TANKARD (6th Permutation)” is an immediate attention-grabber. The piece stands chin-high (to a 5-foot-7-inch person like me) and first looks like a tank, then a boat. Artist Travis Townsend of Lexington, Ky., in his artist’s statement, describes his work as “oddly familiar, nearly useful-looking sculptures” in which “the physical or metaphorical functions are left to the imagination.”

You bet. Plywood is his basic material but his screw heads have artistic as well as functional uses. “Another TANKARD” features chairs meant for some race of tiny people and thick twine connecting a small, mysterious wall-mounted object with the shadowy interior of the piece. Color touches are mostly baby pink or blue, and a target is outlined on the facing wall. “Another TAN- KARD,” with penciled notations on its surface and its overall air of transition, suggests the nervous workings of the creative mind.

Travis Townsend absorbs as much space as his wood and found objects “Re-Renovated TLC (Tank Loaf Container)” and “Another Tankard” can grab. Townsend's fanciful hand-built wooden contraptions reach out to the Student Center Gallery walls with ropes, tiny ladders, and wooden attachments placed at strategic angles to no apparent end — except the creator’s makeshift and mock-serious structural design.

The vortex is surely one of the most powerful and terrifying things in the literary and physical universes. It sucks you in and spits you out; transports you from one time and space to another; it vacuums and broadcasts. And in Travis Townsend’s sculptures on display at the Southwest School, they add the “anxious” promised in the show’s title. Mounted on contraptions assembled from rough-hewn blocks and strips of wood, they might be sieves, reservoirs, megaphones, or lasers. The laminated wood Townsend uses to construct them emphasizes their Charybdis-like powers, whether they’re narrow and mounted on something resembling a farm implement, or shallow and broad, attached to a hand-drawn flower on the wall.

.......purposefully stupid, using visual puns and humor to confront serious political issues and blatant contradictions in our own human experiences.

The star of the show, for me, is Travis Townsend, whose wacky wood and mixed-media sculptures of rickety fantasy tools and machines suggest the human condition. Townsend sews wood, ties it together, glues it, and sketches technical plans and numbers on it. He paints parts in ways that defy logic, suggesting the revealed walls of adjacent torn-down old buildings.

The sculptures suggest they might have been jerry-built from imaginary old gizmos, in dire need of retooling and re-imagining. They are held together with a little spit and a touch of humor to create a sense of vulnerability and the need for repair. Every time I see Townsend’s work, I like it better (three sightings so far.)

I have always admired the work of those makers who approach their work with a sense of purpose beyond the marketplace. It is a difficult path to take. My selections for this gallery are based on my belief that one should always stay true to that little voice that drove us at the start and continues to steer us on our way. That little individual voice is the soul of our craft, the soul of our society. It defines what artists are and do. It has the capacity to make us happy! The work of these artists reveals a quality or feeling of both surface and form that to my mind is just right- a Goldilocks situation.

Travis Townsend's work is like a memento of when we were seven years old and still did things for all the right reasons- for the sheer joy of it- before we let things like mortgages and insurance payments pave our intentional way. The rawness of Travis's work helps us all get down to that place where we once began.

Townsend's "Renovated Flightless Devices" are truly something to behold. Large wooden contraptions with strings, hinges, wheels, and rudders, they're like wildly oversized wind-up toys from decades past. They'd be any kid's dream, if only they actually did anything. Then again, the mere possibility that they might work, and imagining what they would do, is cool enough.

Craft objects tend to be relatively small and avoid the monumental scale implicitly invited by spacious contemporary museums. Ceramists Sergei Isupov and Suk-Jin Choi, fabric artists Nicole Haimbach and Maria Kovacs, and woodworkers Kate Hudnall and Travis Townsend, all create objects more closely scaled to the body than to monumental architecture. Their art works do not require large, formal exhibition spaces, but are quite at home in more personal and familial surroundings.

The playfulness in Townsend's pieces suggests he thoroughly enjoys creating his work..............the sculpture resembles a satellite that has collided with other objects in space after too many years of service.

Townsend's objects conjure up submarines, houseboats and birdhouses. They have rudders, wheels and peepholes, and are pieced together like a 3D jigsaw puzzle then carefully painted with whimsical sherbet colors. Townsend is able to create a wonderful sense of spontaneity; the objects seem to leap directly from their maker's imagination, leapfrogging past the process of their making.