Travis Jeppesen
Travis Jeppesen is an American novelist, poet, and art critic. His novels include The Suiciders, Wolf at the Door, and Victims.
In 2008, his play Daddy premiered at the HAU Theater in Berlin, under the direction of Ron Athey. A riffing on the Lolita myth, the play explores what happens when an 11-year-old boy impregnates his school teacher. Simultaneously, the boy's mother becomes involved with a local UFO cult. In Jeppesen's words, "The 'daddy' of the title is an 11-year-old boy, who, fatherless, becomes a father himself – and then, by a certain turn of events, doesn’t. The other father, I suppose, is Preacher Creacher, the leader of the cult, who instills himself as a fake father over others – yet his sincerity is ambivalent throughout. So the figure of the father goes through many cycles of presence and absence throughout the course of the play. In this sense, I’d say it’s quite productive – we’re gonna make a lot more daddies than we are babies."
Jeppesen's critical writings on art, film, and literature have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, New York Press, Bookforum, The Stranger, and Zoo Magazine. He is the recipient of a 2013 Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/the Warhol Foundation. A collection of his art criticism, Disorientations, was published in 2008; subsequently, Jeppesen launched disorientations.com, a "one-man art magazine." In October 2011, Jeppesen announced that he would be shifting the focus of the website to explore his notion of object-oriented writing, "a new form – neither poetic nor art-critical, yet retaining characteristics of both – that attempts to inhabit the object. That is, a writing that positions itself within the work of art, and also including all the necessary contradictions and impossibilities embedded within such an approach." Object-oriented writing could be thought of as a parallel creative practice to object-oriented ontology. As of 2013, Disorientations also includes links to Jeppesen's published art reviews and essays online, as well as miscellaneous poetry, fiction, and essays he has written, much of it previously only available in print form.
In 2014, his object-oriented writing will be featured in the Whitney Biennial and in a solo exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery in London. A collection of novellas, All Fall, is forthcoming from Publication Studio.
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