The Center for Maine Contemporary Art recently hosted a conversation between Ian and Dr. Aaron Rosen, director of the Parsonage Gallery.
Follow the link below to watch the recording of their conversation, which covered themes found in Trask’s work including: choreographing shadows, the juxtaposition of improvisation and calculation, and the importance of play, repetition, and (eco-)systems in his practice.
There's an abundance of thought-provoking and emotionally moving art on display at the Rockland institution.
The current grouping of shows at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland is notable in so many ways, not least of which is that each one of the four exhibits is spectacular in its own right.
Some of their themes overlap, but for the most part, each evokes a particular contemplation and/or set of emotions. It is rare that a museum experience is so thoroughly and consistently satiating from one end to the other. All run through Jan. 8.
Ian Trask, ‘Mind Loops’
This exhibition features recent suspension wall installations by the Brunswick-based artist Ian Trask. The work is all recent and endlessly intriguing in terms of its materiality, mechanistic form and environmental message. Upon entering the museum, visitors are confronted with “Cosmic Thread,” a monumental wall work that initially looks like a perpetual motion machine, except that it is stationary.
Trask is well known for intercepting materials from the waste stream, a process and approach that makes us both question what trash is (one man’s is another’s treasure, as the saying goes), and examine the sheer magnitude of the garbage humanity generates in proportion to its presence on the planet.
The materials he uses in “Cosmic Thread” (and other smaller works) are textile belts and trims, felt, slide projector carousels and wooden wheel molds. It is slightly miraculous to realize, as we immerse ourselves in particular sections of the work, how banal materials so summarily discarded can be transformed into such beauty.
The way Trask mixes colors and textures, matte elements with glittery ones, and areas where belts hang slack with others where they are tightly wound, produces a kind of movement and rhythm that syncopates our vision across the wall. From a distance, we can also decipher what look like familiar forms (a nautilus shell, a finial like those atop Hindu stupas, flowers, pupae) mixed with more abstract lines, loops and decorative motifs.
Trask has worked every inch of this piece, most evident when one examines the carousels, each of which is treated differently. One appears stuffed with an Ace bandage, another with hazard tape, etc. The intricacy is mind-boggling.
Other works hew more closely to what we are used to with this artist. They consist of balls made of recycled materials that have been bundled and tied together, then suspended on monofilament to create patterns in front of walls that cast their shadows onto them. The most interesting one is “Infinite Pathways” for, again, its sense of movement. It feels almost like a labyrinth or trails left by tiny creatures in the sand or soil.
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Among his favorite places to pass time are the student organic gardens at Bowdoin College.
When he was studying biology at Bowdoin College in the early 2000s, Ian Trask was set on a career in science research. Then, after graduating, the Massachusetts native spent a couple of years working in genetics labs and found the work didn’t live up to his romantic expectations.
At Bowdoin, however, Trask had developed a strange little hobby: taking spoons from the dining hall, then bending and twisting them into little sculptures. While enrolled, he hadn’t taken a single art class, but in his early 20s, he got to know Bowdoin professor and sculptor John Bisbee, who was bringing a group of Bowdoin students to Tennessee’s Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, to craft interactive sculptures there.
“It was the first time in my life where I woke up in the morning and I had nothing to do all day but make art,” Trask remembers. “I found that experience to be very energizing.”
This month, Trask has two big solo shows up, Mind Loops, at Rockland’s Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and Life Hack, at West Gardiner’s Center for Maine Craft. Though the work is different at each — wall-mounted installations in Rockland, computer mice transformed into insectoid cyborgs in West Gardiner — both are informed by Trask’s science background and bear what’s become his artistic stamp: the use of man-made refuse for materials, including discarded electronics and parts, junk-store bric-a-brac, and literal trash.
But as much as his work relies on synthetic debris, Trask has a bucolic streak, and when he’s not making art at his studio in Brunswick’s Fort Andross mill, he’s gardening or tending to chickens at home, across the Androscoggin River, in Topsham. Among his favorite places to pass time are the student organic gardens at Bowdoin, where Trask picked up a part-time job to learn the ins and outs of organic horticulture. Visitors to one of the quiet, green plots at the edge of campus might find a greenhouse Trask helped build, a row of fruit trees he helped plant, or a hardy kiwi vine he spent countless hours treating and pruning.
“The more time you spend in a place, the more you feel connected to it,” Trask says, reflecting on the garden. “Knowing it’s in such a high-traffic location, where a bunch of students are going to receive the same education and formative experience, it’s nice to know that in some ways, I’ve contributed and left a mark there.”
Maine Magazine features Ian’s work in a list of up-and-coming artists in Maine!
Read MoreThe amazing team of Lights Out Gallery visited Ian in the studio, then put together this wonderful video.
Watch Ian’s interview below.