Reid Trevarthen has graduated from duct tape to National Geographic. There’s no telling what he’ll graduate to next.
When Trevarthen was a teenager, he developed a vision of duct-tape collage art that lifted his sticky works into local exhibitions and art galleries. But his palette was strictly black and white, he said, and he eventually started hungering for more color and meaning.
“So I turned to my mom’s old National Geographic collection,” he said. “There is a broad range of colors and styles, and everyone has a collection they want to get rid of. It really invigorated me. I thought, ‘This could be really interesting.’ “
After he graduated last year from The Evergreen State College in Olympia with a general bachelor of liberal arts degree, he was looking to push his art back onto the front burner. He was in “post-graduation slump” and asking himself, ” ‘What am I doing? Who am I?’ All those small questions,” he said.
The 23-year-old decided to give an artistic career a real go. “Now is the time to really push making it as an artist,” he said. He rented studio space and started making collages full time.
Trevarthen especially loves working with National Geographic’s electron microscope photographs, he said. For example, he’ll start by cutting up images of a fly’s head or a flower petal and use those hyper-real fragments to build something brilliantly colorful and entirely different than its source. He produces both abstract and realistic subjects, he said, “just to keep different muscles flexing.”
Why collage? “I see the world and human life as very complex,” he said. “All these independently meaningful elements come together. That’s the same way I feel about my collages. You make choices and all these chaotic elements start coming together to create a beautiful cohesive piece.”
Working with pre-made fragments is “manageable,” Trevarthen said, while traditional artistic media like painting have remained “mysterious” to him. It’s like playing the piano versus trying the trombone, he said: one instrument conveniently lays out all the notes you can use, while the other requires guesswork and sliding around.
Trevarthen’s newest collages will be on display beginning with a reception during downtown Vancouver’s First Friday Art Walk, 5-9 p.m. Nov. 7 at the North Bank Artists Gallery, 1005 Main St. The artist will be there, and also will welcome visitors to his North Bank studio throughout the rest of the weekend during business hours for the Clark County Open Studios event. Learn more about that at http://ccopenstudios.org
Also, Trevarthen will be on hand for a talk and Q&A session at 6-8 p.m. Nov. 12 at North Bank. He’ll share gallery space and talk time with filmmaker Kathi Rick, who is also premiering new work.
Both artists’ works will stay on display at North Bank through Nov. 29.
Learn more about Trevarthen at http://reidtrevarthen.net
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