Travis McEwen
Region: Midwest
City / State: Santa Cruz, CA
I make paintings inspired by themes of isolation, queerness, and world-building. My practice borrows from the visual aesthetics and motifs of science fiction, which has long been a site and space to imagine other ways of being and other possibilities for this world. I am interested in how queer subjects face and share an experience of isolation, and how this can drive acts of world-building. My work depicts isolated figures, singly or in groups, in desert and steppe-like landscapes. Increasingly, these landscapes include flora in an effort to move away from bleakness and toward something more hopeful. Even environments in apparent collapse or abandonment still have care to be given and things to be tended to. I have no interest in bleak dystopias or post-apocalypses. Semiarid, arid, and other similarly harsh landscapes are not devoid of life, but rather places containing great biodiversity and a remarkable variety of means for adaptation.
![](https://nap-master.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/styles/bio_cover_img/public/mcewen_headshot_edit.jpg?wBQBaYZqpEjFWceSs4TPPh_txnsYOnBV&itok=b7g-nsAV)