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February 9, 2010

No such thing as a junk drawer

Salt Lake artist Trent Alvey’s latest project: Finding science in everYday life.

Salt Lake City mixed-media artist Trent Alvey doesn’t have to go looking for inspiration. It finds her, leaping out of landscapes on her global travels, or subtly announcing itself from a jumble of junk in a drawer.
“I have to sort of report on what I see, what I’m picking up on,” Alvey explains. “It’s not a choice.”

Lately, Alvey’s been picking up on some scientific theories she’s studied, with ideas for new artworks coming at her from all manner of everyday objects and activities. Her lifelong fascination with science is paying off in impressively creative ways.

“My favorite science term of late is ‘emergent phenomenon,’ … which in the mid-last-century was the study of any self-organizing system, like flame, water, traffic, weather, the stock market,” Alvey says. “Then this book came out called The Wisdom of Crowds, and it sort of took the concept of emergent phenomenon and overlaid it onto herds, swarms, crowds. Ultimately, we’re all just one big self-organizing species.

“I just loved the idea, because here we were mid-Bush, sort of the ultimate in absurdity in the Bush regime, and I’m thinking, ‘Crowd wisdom? Yeah, right!’”

Putting science to work

	See images from Trent Alvey's show, Urban Artifacts.

The emergent phenomenon concept was filling Alvey’s thoughts when she was trying to come up with something for Present Tense: A Post-337 Exhibit, a 2008 collaborative show at the Salt Lake Art Center. She contemplated a number of ideas before she landed on one she called Urban Artifacts.

Alvey started filling jars with all manner of odds and ends: toy army men, buttons, rubber bands. Everywhere she looked, another emergent phenomenon in need of documenting jumped out at her. And into the jars they’d go. “I thought, ‘Oh my god. Do I want to fill up 200 jars, or 300 jars? I could go completely insane,’” Alvey says. “So I just thought, ‘I’ll start handing out these jars to artists, friends, businesses, anybody,’ as randomly as I could, to try and get a cross-section of our little Salt Lake City herd.”

“It really got to be interesting to see what people would do. It was almost like a psychological profile. Some people were very meticulous. Other people would just scoop up the contents of their junk drawers and put it in there.”

Once the show opened, Alvey found herself overlooking the gallery space from the windows a story above, watching people pause, fascinated by the massive collection of her beloved emergent phenomena.

“People wanted to pick them up and look at them, because that’s what you do with jars!” Alvey says, with genuine joy that her art was compelling people to reach out and touch it.

Born into this

At 60, Alvey is older than many of her fellow artists in the Salt Lake art scene. But you wouldn’t know that looking at her work. And considering she spent “the middle of my life in complete chaos,” and decided just nine years ago to focus solely on her art, Alvey is a true contemporary of the 20- and 30-somethings she shares shows and workspace with at Captain Captain Studios.

Alvey grew up in Mt. Pleasant, Utah, where her father worked in the forest service. The youngest child by seven years, she was a happy loner in the small central-Utah town, drawing and painting to entertain herself. By 16, she knew she wanted to be an artist, but she was sidetracked into a graphic design career. 
Eventually she earned a degree in art from Westminster College, but her graphic design work always seemed to take precedence over her fine-art aspirations.

“I sort of had an epiphany about the year 2000, and decided I had to stop doing graphic design and do my art full-time, because I couldn’t make the kind of progress I wanted to make doing it part-time,” Alvey says.

Since then, Alvey’s art has evolved into a mixed-media mélange of painting and sculpture, light and sound, large-scale works and smaller pieces. All of it is part of Alvey’s personal “learning quest,” as she puts it.

“I feel like I have this ability to see a theme, to see something that’s going on, and then going ahead and interpreting it and trying to translate it into something for people to look at. I’m not trying to get people to come to any specific conclusion. I’m just saying, ‘Here, look at this.’”

A post-337 world

Following her experience with the original 337 Project, Alvey sees herself collaborating more with artists she’s gotten to know of late. “337 was a real eye-opener for me,” Alvey says. “Artists my age are usually lonely, sequestered. It was just fun to go over there and work [at the 337 space]. All those artists, most younger, were so considerate and so helpful .

“[Before 337], I had sort of focused on who galleries had decided were ‘worthy’ artists. I thought, ‘They must be good artists since they sell their work.’ But 337 was such a wide range of artistic talent. I don’t know if I ever would have tapped into that community without participating.” That trend continues with Shelf Life: Preserving Artifacts, a spin-off of Urban Artifacts, which opens at Art Access Gallery June 19.

Alvey asked 30 artists to contribute to the show, which will include new jars, jars painted by regional artists, plus some jars that have been evolving since the Past Tense show. Among the artists involved: 6-year-old Kinny Blanford, Utah professor Sam Wilson, and 337 vets Sri Whipple and Trent Call. The variety of styles that will be on display should be impressive.

“I like getting artists together because amazing things happen,” Alvey says. “I like being around artists, talking to them, all of that.”

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