Conversation with Ian Trask

Please enjoy my conversation with Ian Trask. Ian is a sculptor and multimedia artist who transforms waste materials into objects and installations with new purpose and integrity. His immersive works often play with sophisticated patterns, lending unlikely materials exquisite beauty. At other times, he works on an intimate scale with puckish humor.

https://www.iantrask.com/ 

https://www.bonnaroo.com/

Art Under The Bridge Fest https://dumboartsfestival.com/

https://www.theinvisibledog.org/

https://massmoca.org/artist-in-residence/

https://pioneerworks.org/

https://www.bwac.org/

https://www.artichokedance.org/

Cambrian Explosion https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/february/the-cambrian-explosion-was-far-shorter-than-thought.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachtenburg_Family_Slideshow_Players 

This podcast was created by Natalya Khorover. It was produced and recorded by Natalya, as well as researched and edited by her. SALVAGE is a product of ECOLOOP.ART.

If you enjoy this show, please rate and review us wherever you’re listening—and be sure to come back for another conversation with a repurposed media artist.

Music theme by RC Guida

Visit Natalya’s website at www.artbynatalya.com

Visit Natalya’s community at www.repurposercollective.com

Visit Natalya’s workshops at https://www.ecoloop.art/

Transcript

Welcome to Salvage, a podcast for conversations with artists about the repurposed materials they use in their art practice. Hey there. Welcome to my conversation with Ian Trask. Ian is a sculptor and a multimedia artist who transforms waste materials into objects and installations with new purpose and integrity. His immersive works often play with sophisticated patterns, lending unlikely materials exquisite beauty.

At other times, he works on an intimate scale with puckish humor. Thank you for being here, Ian. I am delightful to have made your acquaintance because we were together in the Plasticulture show. So, I knew about your work beforehand, and I can't tell you how many people have sent me images of your work before and after we met.

That's great. Oh, it's great to meet you at the opening. Yeah, but after that, it's like. It's so funny because I used to. I don't remember how many years ago I discovered your work. And of course, I was obviously attracted to it because of my own work. And then after I knew about it, I would get, you know, people would send me pictures and be like, yes, yes, I can't wait to one day meet this guy.

And now I'm like, oh, I know that guy. Kind of when it works that way, doesn't it? It is, it is so. But, if you don't mind, I want to start at the very beginning. Were you an artist as a kid? Yes, I was. I really loved art as a kid. I just, I, you know, like the the yearbook superlatives section for eighth grade.

You know, I got, most artistic, and then in high school, I love going to, like, prep school so I can all get a Jesuit prep school, but also more, I guess conventional academics and really have an art program. So my only really option to take art in high school was to do it as, like, a after afterschool club.

Okay. So kind of stay present. And then while I was at college, Bowdoin College in Maine, which is a liberal arts school. My, my studies were mostly in science. It's really hard to fit in art labs. In art classes because you're like, you had all these other blocks of time that were dominated by science labs.

So I ended up getting a little bit of drawing and a little bit of photography, but like, that's almost the extent of my art education. That's cool. I got to art kind of through my own, my own path, I guess. Now that's important. And what kind of science did you study? Like a lot of ecology and marine biology, some genetics and cell biology.

So, that's cool and interesting stuff. Yeah. And, like, I studied abroad in Copenhagen, and I took a lot of marine biology classes there about, like, marine mammals and. Yeah. Oh, well, to have that as a baseline. Yeah. That's so cool. And you got to travel too. Yeah. For sure. It's amazing. And so drawing and a little bit of painting and that kind of stuff.

And how did you have a career in science after you went to school? Very much so. So after graduating, I moved to Boston and I got a job in a genetics lab. So called the Channing Lab, which is affiliated with the Brigham and Women's Hospital. And they were studying respiratory diseases. So I was there for about a year.

And then one of my good friends from school was living in Salt Lake City, and he was like, you should come live out here, live with me, and like, we can snowboard and rock climb. And so I moved out there, kind of pursuing fun, I guess, and got into in another science lab, this time the University of Utah.

It was another genetics lab. And this one was studying, sort of what signals are muscle tissue to grow into the shapes into the, the essentially muscle tissue. So we use like a mouse model I took care of, like my job was to manage the interbreeding of, like, 300 plus lab mice. Oh, my gosh, keep track of all that.

Yeah. So that was that was the first two years out of school. And that's really where I thought my life was going. But I kind of had this hobby that I picked up in my last two years at Bowdoin, bending forks into little sculptures. Oh, okay. I didn't see that on your website. Okay. And that started okay.

Like my first sort of foray into, like, exploring a single material with some intensity. And, you know, after school, after Bowdoin, where I no longer had my free source of forks from the dining hall. I would buy them from goodwill stores for years. And that kind of was something that just kind of maintained in the background. Long enough for me to develop a habit and get some positive feedback from people around me.

And that was kind of a, I guess, sort of the the kernels of me becoming an artist. Okay. There was a lot of things that kind of coalesced ahead of few opportunities along the way to, not right after graduation, maybe a year later, to work with an artist who would bring a bunch of art kids to a field in Tennessee for the Bonnaroo Music Festival.

Oh, cool. And then he would divide them up into little groups, and they would make interactive sculptures in the campgrounds. And that's I did that for three Bonnaroo and festivals. So 2006, seven and eight. So that was kind of happening concurrently. While I was in the lab. And these were just these like formative experiences for me, where I would go and have nothing to do all day but make art.

And that was my first time being so fully immersed, in art making. And what kind of sculptures did you make with these kids? So Art, my group specifically, we used yarn. So we kind of would put these grids of steel fence posts into the grass and then just supply as much as we could budget them, just let people kind of do what they wanted, and we would kind of tidied up and shape it kind of in between, sort of the, the tenders of the garden, I guess.

But it was, it was very chaotic. It was a, it was a good lesson in not being too attached to what you make. Let's go to lunch and come back. And everything you had done was like obliterated by. Oh, no. Yeah. So I guess and that was sort of also an early lesson there was that like the first year we used all this yarn and then we started in these trash bags and we came the next year.

We pulled all that yarn out to reuse it again. And it's like it's much harder to use when it's a tangled mess, when it's sort of tidy in those skeins or bundles. So there was a, there was a degree of figuring out what to do with the mess, which in some ways is part of what we both do, you know?

Yes, you could call it that. Yeah. So I guess from there, if you want to kind of know the journey. I was very lucky to have a bus at the time in Utah, who was very encouraging when I told her that I was considering leaving the science field and pursuing art, you know. Oh, wow. That's unusual. Yeah, I would have expected maybe a little more, I guess.

Resistance, but I think she just she just had a really good perspective on it. I think she met her husband in graduate school and he eventually turned more towards a creative path. And she's like, I've just encountered so many people in our in her field, my field at the time that it's sort of committed so far down sort of an education path, research that like, it's almost impossible to turn around.

But they were but they weren't happy doing it. She's like, if you see, now that like, this might not be the right thing for you, I by all means go and pursue this other thing. That's like drawing attention right now. If you had stayed in that field, would you have had to further your education there, like go for a master's or something or a, B, c and I'm sure I would have pursued pursued a master's or PhD at that point.

I think I was just like realizing that like if I were going to go down that path, this art making, this creative thing that was really just like really just hitting all the marks in my head. And I was enjoying it so much. Like, I would have had to push that aside and it really would have become like its full on focus, and some sort of field of study.

Right? And instead, like, you know, I would 5:00 would hit and rather than like staying in the lab and maybe looking at slides of the stuff we prepared that day, you know, rent home and be making things in the garage in Utah. Right? If that's what I wanted to do now. That's great. Wow. So how did you make that leap?

Did you quit your job and just decided to try to start out as an artist, or did little things sort of start happening? Yeah, I mean, it was it was kind of a slow, a bit of a slow process because, like, I didn't really know how that worked. Right? You know, I didn't really have the formal training to do it.

I didn't really have a network. I think where it started first was sort of a mental decision of just, okay, it's what I want to do is to be an artist and I want to make things like, how about any time I have this idea, creative impulse, I make it happen, you know? So focus on, completing ideas and making things and kind of moving on to new ideas.

I'm like, let that just be this foundational habit. So that was started with that. And then I decided that Salt Lake City wasn't really the right place to, to kind of to make that jump into the art world. It just seems like there wasn't a fertile enough ground. So I was like, I've got some friends in New York City.

How about I try to go move to New York? And that's when this, like this other key moment happens where I needed to raise some money to pay rent, obviously. So I went back home to Massachusetts, where I grew up, to work for a few months to make some money. And that job that I got was actually, as a groundskeeper at a hospital.

So my dad was a hospital administrator for years. So he worked at Harrington Hospital in Southbridge, mass. And at a previous moment, previous summer in my life, I worked there is just kind of like a work with the grounds crew, just kind of helping them do what they need to do, like shuttle boxes around. Most of this time I got this job as a groundskeeper and really it was it was picking up garbage in parking lots, like, was the job.

So, you know, you can kind of. But he's got to do it. He's got to do it. And you can kind of picture my, my, mental state at the moment being like, I have this extensive degree from Bowdoin College in science. I've got, like, my name on a published paper. You know, I've got like years of I've got, like a fully fleshed out resume in science.

And now I'm quitting that to become an artist, which I don't even know what that means. And I'm picking up trash every day and just kind of like, it's like, what the hell am I doing? That's, but it was. And there was a lot of, like, frustration built into that. Obviously, you know, that the fresh landscape of literature, a sort of aggravating, and it kind of just like a little bit of a fire in me, you know, I here's this thing that can be sort of, I don't know.

I think anger in that sense is kind of a motivating force. Right? I don't know if anger is the right choice, but it was kind of like it gave me this thing that I could focus on. And it was, I think it it also became apparent that it was, just an infinite amount of material out there that I.

So here is is something that wouldn't cost me any money, which was important for me at the time, because really, I didn't I wasn't planning to go to art school. I wasn't really planning on, like, pursuing it conventionally. So I needed to find a way that I could make it work that was going to be cost effective. And it was, you know, I think I was originally drawn to research for this positive benefit.
00:12:52:15 - 00:13:21:05
Unknown
It has society. So kind of finding a way to channel some of that. Some of that, I guess, optimism. Optimism or just like, okay. Yeah. A little bit of how can I improve the world around me. And I think channeling my sort of appreciation of the environment and kind of my understanding of humans as sort of part of this greater ecology, all that mixed up together with like, I love that.

So did you, during that job, start making something with the trash that you were finding? I did I would bring things and I'd be like making weird mobiles in my parents basement. I don't think any of those actually survived. But yeah, I was I was definitely doing some weird stuff with it. So curious what kind of.

So this would what what year would this have been around? That would have been, 2007. And what kind of trash were you finding in the parking lot in 2007? Keyboards, bicycle parts? I got these, like, really great, like electrical cords that were, like, at least like an inch plastic that just had all these, like, brown sort of insulating papers twisted up with all these other, like, kind of like bundles of wires inside of it, which, it was and I still have some in my studio that still use some of them today.

Oh that's cool. Yeah. But a lot of, like, weird little lot of, like, metal and stuff like that. Interesting. So not plastic though. Not. Yeah. Not specific. I mean, I guess the keyboards had plastic, right? But I like they're not plastic bottles and bottle caps and things like that, which is what you find now. Right.

Interesting. So, so after that gig, you moved to New York and started pursuing your career in earnest, correct? Yeah, that was probably it was probably a good. So that was early 2008 or like, I guess end of 2007, 2008 to New York. Took me a little bit of time to find like, a good job. I worked as a temp at, like, jewelry designer, which was kind of a pretty awful job.

But then I ended up getting really lucky and getting hired at, like, it was an art gallery that had its own frame shop. Oh. So it was this French gallery owner who had his own base and like Atlantic Ave and Brooklyn. At like galleries and Chelsea and San Francisco and New Orleans and Boston and a lot of his like artists were French or European.

And like he would ship all their paintings and roads to Brooklyn Wood and we would, you know, stretch a little frame of, oh, so I got this job first as the, the shipper for that company, and then their framer, one of the framers they had on hand was just doing a bad job. So they ended up training me to be a framer.

So I worked as a framer for four years for this. Oh, wow. Which was pretty cool. It was actually, it was actually a great way to get a new stream of material and to have a shop at my disposable at my disposal, which I think was the at that moment. So I didn't really have a studio. I was just right.

Oh, so they let you do stuff in their shop? Oh that's cool. He was also great. He was like, he owned, they're not like a retail space across the street, too. There was a doctor's office, but when the doctor's office moved out, he let me like, work in these empty rooms across the street. I've been very lucky at having.

That's so great. They have words or bosses that let me use random basements or empty spaces. It's. I've been fortunate in that sense. That's very cool. Well, so what kind of things were you making? And from what at that time? Well, I think I've always sort of had like numerous passed away at work. I even since as early as those times, I was doing like larger scale installation work, and I was doing most of that with cardboard.

Yeah, I saw that, that looked really cool. And that was this cardboard you were getting from the shop, some from the shop, and if I needed more, I would just walk down the sidewalk right. Hope I got there before the dogs. Did. You know? But yeah, that was kind of my my favorite material for a long while.

And it was, it was nice in that, like, because I didn't really have permanent spaces if I showed something and then I didn't have room for it, you know, you can kind of put it back in the system, right? Rather easily. So there's a lot of cardboard at that time. But I was also just like building frames with scrap molding.

So I would use a lot of like wood molding from the frame shop. I use a lot of Plexiglas and foam core and just like build frames as sort of vessels to, called materials, I was coming across, it was kind of around that time that I started using thermoformed plastic packaging, even like order a shop tool and you'd have this, like, this little.

It was almost like the plexi to your frame was this cool shape thing. And I was like, right little step behind it and make these little one off pieces. That's what those are. Okay. And then eventually, because I was doing that, people would save those and give them to me, which I'm sure we'll get into. It turned into a whole a whole body of work down the road because I just had acquired this collection.

Yeah. So where did you keep that collection? I mean, it really, it evolved. You know, there's a period where I was just working in an apartment, my apartment, and then my landlord let me work in his garage. And then I just got really lucky. In 2009. So I worked for about a year before I really gained any traction and had an opportunity to show my work.

But in 2009, I almost got into three three shows, all at the same time. Oh one was an outdoor, an outdoor art show in Dumbo, at the Bridge Festival. So I did a big cardboard installation there. And then one of the shows I got into was by this new art group called Recession Arts. They were kind of they had like a bunch of pop up shows.

I didn't really have a home base, but they rented the top floor of a new art center called the Invisible Dog. I've heard of it. I've never been. But they're still around, right? The Invisible Dog, they're still around, but they are on their final year in that building. So, they're kind of evolving their program. And I thought, okay, they're going to do sort of guest art direction in different places.

And I said, but yeah, so I was in a show in this building where the Invisible Dog had its new art center, and like, you know, I at that time it was still pretty. It was underdeveloped. So it was an old, textile factory. At one point they made, like, belts and suspenders and, the invisible dog toy, which is that like gimmicky toy that was popular in the 70s that looks like a dog leash with no dog in it, like, oh, is that is that where the name came from?

I had no idea. And like, someone had made a bench in the gallery out of these stacked spools of colorful elastic belts. You know, I was talking to the people behind the session or the like, if you go through that door there, there's like thousands of them. And I just, like, went through the door and it was like the half of the building that was under developed.

The windows are busted out. There's like pigeons lining in these like, stuck holes. But I was like, here's this, this is what I'm doing is like, I'm looking for interesting materials in the world around me and this, like, treasure trove. So it was just presented to you. And I approached museums and it was the director, and it kind of was like, what are you doing with all that material?

You know? And he's like, well, I'm going to give it away to artists for free. You know, if they give something back. And that just turned into this, like incredibly magical relationship for me, where he gave me a key to the building and then he just let me use just like anything I wanted in the basement. So the basement was just, like, absolutely stuffed with stuff that was sort of cleared out of upper floors and just kind of stashed in this basement.

And I cobbled together a desk out of, like, all these random things I just started making down there. Like, I was down there for about three months in the winter of 2009, and then as he started to develop the building and build in studios, he let me have a studio for free for like another six months. And it was this just like it was just perfect for me, because all of a sudden I had a community of artists around me of all sorts, all different abilities, and just making such amazing work.

And it was just like that became my my art school. I was just having access to these people, not just at shows, but just socially in between moments and just like, yeah, I mean, stuff. Oh that's amazing. So is that where you made that? I guess a hothouse out of old windows and doors. So actually I didn't make that building.

They the, an artist in the building. And Maria, she's, a French artist. Her husband was actually the owner of the building and had sort of a construction crew that worked out of the basement that actually serviced other nearby apartments that he owned as well. And she had a project to, I don't know, she actually, she commissioned them to build that.

Oh, for a show of her own. But then she continued to show other artists that, oh, that's cool. Well, that was perfect for your exhibit. Yeah, it worked out really nice. Yeah. Tell me what you hung in there. So I'm one of them. One way that I, deal with the random materials that I acquire, is to bind them up into these little orbs, and it's just kind of become like, an easy way for me to consume and trap things.

Thinking about it too hard because, like, I'll just I'll take one step back and be like, in the beginning, it was what materials I could find personally. And the tower, you know, I kept that was my gateway into sort of traction as a medium. But I'm sure you're familiar with this, that other people witness that and then they're sort of eager to participate and share and give you things.

And like, I really tried to open my daughter to that interaction and, you know, just be, very accepting and as many materials as I can. But like, all those materials are, I guess, esthetically interesting. So there are ways for me to like, just to up those things and put them into a material, like put them into a visual form.

And that's like, I, I use string mostly, and I bind up these little, to bind up these random materials into these balls. And then I found that as those balls accumulated, I was like the the potential for what I could do with it. Right. So. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Because I, I get a lot of unsolicited materials myself.

And then I sometimes, sometimes I use it and other times some things in there that I'm like, oh, I don't know what to do with this. That's a good idea. Maybe I'll be making some balls now to, it was. And then there was a certain point where I had a residency. I was at a residency at MSU.

Okay. Has this. Oh, cool. You know, program. Yeah. And that was the first time I tried suspending them. Before, they were always just, like, heavy crimps on the ground. And I generally try to make them out of, like, singular materials, so I call the same object. But that really just changed over time. And then I tried suspending them and all of a sudden these, like, sort of small, inconsequential ones just had this presence instead they could spin and kind of shake and vibrate and it just kind of like it really made them come alive.

And so that glass house structure, the one you mentioned, the four out of, like old windows and doors I suspended, I don't know, maybe like 250. I will allow in this volume. And I called it waste of space kind of being like, you know, we like to think about interplanetary travel and colonizing new planets. Like, what's the point if we don't even know how to, like, treat our current home right?

But then we can stay living on it. So like this idea of, like, you know, two minutes, this parasitic invader laying waste to the space around us, but, you know, that is also kind of a part in that, like that glass house structure was actually built in an empty lot that probably some developer could have turned into a project in this little glass house art space was technically a waste of space from that sort of financial side.

Yeah, you could go to so many different, ways there is that how is that glass House still exist? You know, I think I had to take it down. I think that a permanent on it. And then they were almost like, I would have had to pay too much to keep it there. That's too bad. It's very cool looking, but I'm glad you got a chance to exhibit at it.

Oh. Very cool. Well, and so the the image that other people share with me, most of your work is your little hothouse or out of plastic containers, which is that is there only one version of it or there are. There are more than one versions of it. There are. So that's so the one that was are you talking about the one that was in the SVA show?

Yes. That one, one was like a, you know, like a backyard scale greenhouse frame that was clad in, stitched together clear plastic packaging. Right. That's like, that's a later development. That project started in 2015. 2014, 2015 when the Invisible Dog gave me, like he said, it was like, I want to give you a solo show, make something big.

And I picked something. And he was like, you know, try, try harder. Like, I want, I want you to, like, really be out of your element on this one. And that's where I was in my studio. Just kind of like looking around at what I had. And for me, like big installation work starts. The question kind of starts with access to a material, right?

It's not just like I have this vision and I'm going to execute it, and no matter what, I'm going to get there. Thomas, like, do I can I find enough of this thing to make my goal right? So like the you're kind of thinking through access to material at the same time as you're thinking about the final object, right?

Like, they both they both inform each other. Sure. Like, if I can't get enough of it between now and, the opening. Right, like, I'm not going to make something that's three times as big as I have, because like that, that just doesn't work. So I was kind of like looking around at what I had in my studio, trying to extrapolate, you know, what materials are out there?

What what can I really ask my community to help me source? And I just had those box, this box of maybe 50 of those packages and in my head, and, like, I know there's there's just millions of those there. Can I get enough of them in the six months, seven months I have between saying yes to taking the opportunity to the actual that but, and then from there I was like, I think I can.

So I started with kind of a demo, so maybe just like a little patch of it, there and also thinking about attachments. I didn't really want it to be glued. Okay. I knew that, that it probably wouldn't last. Yeah. Like I end up kind of abusing it as I move it around and I in my head, the nightmare was just like, I want to install when I'm installing this, it's going to be like cracking, installing a part right?

Just a terrifying nightmare. So I was like, I need something that's a little more pliable. And I also had some internet wire in my studio. So I stripped the internet, wire the plastic coated copper wires and use that as kind of a thread. Like poking holes in the plastic in each, in each package to kind of overlay with one another and then stitching it together.

So they're like little twist ties. Yeah, yeah. Oh, so that project that was like that was the hardest thing I think I've ever done. Just because the timeline was so tight. And the scale of what I wanted to build was pretty massive. It looks massive now. Was this in the invisible dog space? Yeah. And it looks like it's 20ft tall or something like that.

It's like 14ft tall, okay. And 14ft tall. So for the ceiling, like, I wanted it to stretch entirely from the floor to the ceiling. There's four walls that are 16ft. Wow. So, and then it was hollow in the middle with two doorways. And that took, like, that was really hard. I was like, okay, like, I have this much time to collect thousands of packages.

I have to figure out how to, like, talk to people, narrow in on a language to convince people that this is what I'm looking for. Yeah. That was that was a a project in itself kind of thing to talk about what I'm doing and convincing people to bring it somewhere. And then like at the time my studio was maybe ten feet by ten feet.

So how are you going to store and make something? Yeah. So I was like, panicking about where it's going to happen. Yeah. I ended up doing a Kickstarter to raise some money because I had to play it. But my job so full time on this thing, like, oh my God, I got a in there too. You gotta what?

You got ACL surgery in that period is. Oh, no, but surely I got a residency at Pioneer Works, in Red hub. Do you know them? No, I don't, it's this really cool residency program, and, like, an art center is like an old ship building, down by the water and Red hook run by. Oh, yes. Is that is that the.

Brooklyn Artist Coalition? Is that is that there. Is that what I'm thinking about? It's nearby. Okay. In the same neighborhood. Kind of. Okay. They focus a lot on sort of like art and science to them. But yeah, I had the four month residency there, which was just like a godsend. Had a big enough footprint where I could, like, lay out an entire well on the ground, you know, because you kind of got that you have all these different patterns of those clamshell containers or egg egg cartons and stuff like that, and you got to figure out what you have to make patterns.

There's something so quilt like about the patterns that you made. It was very quilt like, and you almost had to. It was tricky too, because it's like if you commit to a pattern to sewing before you know how many packages you're going to get. Oh yeah, you might kind of go too far down a path and find that you can't complete it.

So there's a lot of just like logistics of juggling what I'm collecting and what I'm building with it to for you, making them like in like small panels that you can then rearrange. Yeah. One I knew that, transport it. I'd have to put them in a van. So I made them in a, like, four feet by eight foot section.

Not yet. When I got to the gallery, I kind of stitched them all together in place. And it's almost like when you're laying them out, you have to do it on the ground, because if you do it vertically, gravity kind of stretches them out. So yeah, trying to take these things that are stretchable and like flexible and have them like end up in a very like precise dimension was part of the challenge.

Yeah, that's some challenge there. Wow. Yeah. That was a that was a doozy. But like so I, I made that you know I, I kind of like described it as a plastic tube filling. So it had this like certain packages felt architectural and brick like, you know like enough solid containers. You can define the edges of this kind of architectural space and it feels like masonry.

And then I love the idea of these other packages that are sort of more mysterious, and sort of thinking about them archeologically like, they'll probably outlive the, the actual product. Yep. People discovering them like they're just into the future being like, what was this? You know, like this idea of, like trying to read and understand what it was kind of like you look at hieroglyphics like, yeah, but these shapes define a language.

So I was like kind of using these forms to tell a bit of a story, like a hieroglyphic like story of this community. And what are consumer habits or so. Yeah, I kind of framed the whole thing as a tomb. And, and, you know, I love this idea of, like, we're burying ourselves, or at least we are.

So from there, that was like one of the last projects I did in New York. I ended up moving to Maine later that year. And, you know, the goal was to keep that material out of the waste stream. So and then I just had just enough of these sections that I was like, what am I going to do with this?

Like, at first I was reluctant to really butcher them and reshape them, thinking that way. I'd love to show the installation again. You know, it took me so much time. I'd love to have it right. So at least twice. But that really never happened. I got approached by a choreographer, Lynn Newman, who has a dance company called Artichoke Dance Company, and her work is environmentally focused plastic pollution largely.

And she had a she had a piece called overflow, which was about sort of the trash that gets washed into sewers. And then at certain moments when those sewer systems get overloaded with volumes of water that like shunt off sections into, you know, oceans and other waste, other waterways, and like how that's a, a vector for plastic trash getting into the ocean.

So she was like, would you care to build a set for this performance? So I kind of that was a fun challenge. That was like trying to take this thing that took me multiple days to install in a gallery and, like, reshape it into aspects that could be suspended and put up and taken down in like under ten minutes.

Oh my gosh. Wow. And done by and handled by other people, not me. Oh, and having not seen the actual like black box stay in space until I got there that day. So I was like, oh my god. Oh, I think a lot of my work has that sort of like technical installed brain and like trying to figure out dimensions of galleries and figure out saying this before I actually encountered the problem.

Right. Oh, that's a that's fun though, right? It's a fun time. Yeah. It's it keeps me engaged for sure. So that that's kind of where that project went. And then it wasn't until in the around the pandemic 2021, I was I met an artist at a residency up here in Maine, and then she was curating a show at the University of New England in Portland, kind of about, this is sort of about like, speculative futurism kind of projecting into a not necessarily what reality we will find in 200 years, but like a main, a main in the future and like what would sort of be the various focuses of the of the

Maine community at that time. So she originally enlisted me to help her sort of build some of her work, but I think she got like a little bit overwhelmed and behind and started to invite other people into the show. It was like, do you want to make something? And she had this greenhouse structure and I was like, at that time, when I moved up to Maine, I'd gotten a job as an organic gardener about.

And so I started to like, I spent three years, working in a vegetable garden, and I'm sort of, like, reconnected with being outside a lot and sort of like growing my own food and just sort of understanding the food system, a little more thinly. And I think that's where I was like, okay, like, obviously in the future subsistence is going to be okay, so important.

So like I ended up cladding this little greenhouse in plastic that I had from the original. Okay. So and then the one that's at SVA right now is remaking that same thing. But this time, I got invited to do another show later on about the food system in New York for one of the upstate weekends. And, I was like, well, I can remake the greenhouse, but this time I want to do it entirely with food packaging.

So I just spent some time, found a local transfer station that would let me sift through there clear plastic packaging, and just found a bunch of food packages and built this greenhouse specifically out of food packaging as opposed to like, you know, making a painting of avocado toast. I was like, I want to do something a little more critical of our food system and how you can't buy greens without there being wrapped in.

Yeah. You can't. Yeah, it's either that hard plastic or it's a plastic bag. Yep. You have to go to a farmer's market to find them without the plastic. And even then they will try to give you a plastic bag for it. It's stupid. Wow. Well, that was really cool. It's one of the reasons I noticed your greenhouse is because I had previously had made a greenhouse myself.

A very different greenhouse, but I was in a I had this idea of trying to find a greenhouse frame that I could reuse. I even considered, you know, finding old windows for building it. But I knew that I that's not a skill level that I had. So I would have had to find someone to do it for me.

And then I started a search online for greenhouses. You know, that's like the buy nothing groups on Facebook and all of that. People are always giving stuff away for free. I'm like, oh, I gotta be able to find the greenhouse. Well, guess what? I couldn't. So I wound up buying one on Amazon because I needed the frame and the frame of the one that you have, I have seen you use reminded me of that one.

So. Oh, I wonder if he got his greenhouse on Amazon as well. You know, that one. That one came from another artist. Oh, okay. Yeah. Wow. Well, it's very I those pieces are really quite stunning. I know of another artist who uses those blister packs, but she makes really small pieces out of blister packs, I think the most part.

So it was interesting to see the difference of, you know, it's a it's such a ubiquitous material these days. And I, I've actually had people, some of my students ask me like, what do you do with this stuff? And I've experimented with some of it myself. I've painted it, I've stitched it. I've drawn on it. And I sort of made it into like these little, I don't know, dioramas kind of things where everything is inside, but none of them really grabbed me like they were all.

They're all experiments. They're in an in a bag under a table in my studio because they were interesting. They were cool to experiment with. But it wasn't any. They never came out to be anything that I would show anywhere. So to see my other friends, small creations and your gigantic installations out of those materials is really exciting.

Yeah, I feel like it. It transforms it enough to make it feel beyond trash, I guess. Right? Oh, totally. Yeah. It's just it's, And the one that you did at Invisible Dog. You even had a did you have a a music or a performance inside of it or something like that? We so it was only like a month long show, which was kind of like it's always a little devastating when like, it's not up as long as you want, you know, it's a time.

So I was like, how do I bring as much to this as I can? So I collaborated with some musicians in the past. So anyway, and we did a concert in the space because of the idea that you could, like, watch a concert happening inside the structure from the outside, the structure. So you're like, watching the whole thing through this, get it obscure the sound at all?

Turn it off. I don't know if it was kind of noise music, so. Okay. It was pretty us. Yeah. It was it's it wasn't like normal music. So it was kind of hard to tell if it was obscured by or not. But we had like a fog machine and lasers in there and everything. Oh how cool. And then we also did, there was a group called, like aunts and uncles that was like, a dance group that would do these sort of dance interventions.

And they just had maybe six different performances. And somewhere in the space, somewhere around the space. So this is really cool to see people using it. So I guess and then I had one moment where I had like a guy come by who was a friend to wanted to do some projection in it. Oh, it was exciting. And it's like, I would love to see this again.

It's just never really happened. But like, projecting through the structure, like the shadows you get of the light passing through that are super interesting. And then when it was like in video, it was also pretty cool because you see that shape from the surface of the plastic, but you see the sort of obscured, projection of it on the wall behind it, too.

I was yeah. That's interesting. Very cool. Yeah. Well, so I, I was on your website for a while, but you, you used quite a lot of different materials, which is of course very, very exciting, but textile or cardboard. We talked about the textile as well. Yes. Because that's I don't know where I'm jumping, whether that's earlier work or a more current work, but they're all I mean, I think the textile stuff, I mean, if you want to go way back, Bonnaroo, I was using yarn.

And then the objects are bound in yarn. So there's that. There's a there's a thread, there's this right there at the Invisible Dog. I've been using those elastic, the spools of elastic belts quite a bit. So I'll jump back even further. When I was in the frame shop, one of the things we would often do was so the, the owner who would work with a print shop that was up on the third floor of the building, he would make reproductions of successful paintings by his artists, print them on canvas, and then we would stretch them and, you know, sell them as limited edition prints.

And like, inevitably we would cut these or thin margins off the back to make them, you know, make it look nice and tidy. And we'd have these like thin strips of gesso, linen or gesso canvas. And I used to roll those up, put them in frames and kind of paint them. And then once I started to get access to those colorful elastic belts, I was like, I don't have to paint it anymore.

It already comes with the pigment. And I start to do that same sort of densely packed walls in these frames. But when it came time to give something back to the invisible dog for what they gave to me, I created a permanent piece in their gallery where, rather than kind of compressing these balls into dense shapes, kind of let them exist more, spaced out and interconnected in these sort of like soft mechanical structures that, yeah, this looks really cool.

Yeah, they were quite large. I made, some big ones at this point. I've made two that are probably 30ft or. Oh, well. And it's great because I can just I keep reusing that material. Right. It's like these sort of ephemeral installations that are up for just the right of a show. And I take all that material down and I can reuse again for subsequent show.

I love that. And I've started to sort of incorporate some other materials into it, like most recently, I kind of interwoven that, that elastic into old slide carousels because they're also round firms like this. So, so kind of like it's kind of the same language, but it's disrupted a little bit by the slide carousel because one of the other materials I use a lot for 35 millimeter slides.

So people those are obsolete. Yeah. But there's so many of them up there. Yes. Yeah. So the textile stuff, there's a lot of that. And I just, you know, you get a lot of like, materials that people give you are like almost abandoned craft projects. Right? Which are, but it also recently connected with a company up here in Portland that does some sort of like, large scale printing, textiles for wall treatments and offices and corporate spaces.

And, one of the people that works there is, a painter who's trying to sort of, give the company a greater footprint and kind of connect with the local art community and off the excess materials, or like, sometimes I'll get a big role of, a fabric and maybe it doesn't have the right, like fireproofing treatment so they can use it and so on clients, but they don't want to throw it away.

So they just have, like, these materials that they're trying to sort of upload to people. So I get a lot of I've started to get a lot of material from him as well. Oh, cool. Some more fiber work coming in your future. Yeah. It's, it's, it's another material. I, I end up just sort of like chewing up and trapping in these little balls.

Oh, okay. Yeah. That's kind of like a newer direction for me. Is taking more of the suspended balls, which were previously installations and kind of making, these little relief sculptures, based off of, like, geometric drawings. So I went to thinking back to my old high school math skills, I can kind of take, sort of a curvilinear drawing and then mapped it out and get all the coordinate points along this line, and then I create that one.

But essentially just in points scoring it. Yeah. That's interesting. I just thought, I wonder if so math is quilting is math as well. Are you going to be making like quilts for the wall soon? Going to going to take up some sewing maybe? It's funny, I, I work with textile and like thread and all that stuff for so long.

What I do it in a very, I guess unskilled way that I don't, traditional ways that it's, it's used in attached. Maybe someday I'll get there. You never know where it will take you. Exactly. So I have one more question, if you don't mind. I was really taken by your computer mice. And how you've taken them apart and put them back together.

They're adorable. And strange. Okay. About that series. Yeah. So, that one. It's funny because that's that's in some ways connected to the plastic project. And because, like I said, the thread that I was stitching the plastic quilting together with was of internet cord. There is that period where I was making that and I was like asking for plastic, but also asking for internet cord.

So one of my friends from New York was working as sort of a administrative assistant in this office, and he would often empty up their supply closet of old tech. So he would send me internet cords. We'd also send me, like, headphones and computer mice. So I just had a collection of maybe 30 to 40 mice that he had sent me.

And then it was maybe during the pandemic, someone here in Maine who sort of was trying to create a performance about endangered species. So she asked me if I would make a puppet of an endangered beetle called the Puritan tiger beetle. So I made this puppet of this beetle, and I ended up using a computer mouse to sort of the, like the main body.

And then these sort of like old eyeglasses parts as the legs and stuff. And in my head I was like, this is something that's like small scale. And I feel like I would maybe be successful, that I could sell these things and sort of these fine objects. So it just, I got an opportunity at a gallery up here in Maine.

I was like, okay, I want to I'm going to try to make a bunch of insects out of these computer mice. And it's kind of funny because, like those mice, I had, I actually bound them up in a bar. And they were they were part of another installation. And I just kind of like went over to it and I just kind of like took a pair of scissors and just kind of like harvested this ball off of this, cut it open.

And I just took all the components out of it. And I was like, okay, here's my mice. First thing for me to, like, think about the life of these objects. Like they're maybe not. This might not be their permanent form. They might just kind of be sequestered in this shape and then later I can draw from them if I want to have kind of like the idea of building things that can evolve, I think, like maybe they have multiple shapes or like lives.

So back to the, the mice, yeah, I was kind of basing it off of this moment in sort of the natural history timeline called the Cambrian explosion, where like, you had these environmental conditions that really just created this, like really explosion in the diversity of lifeforms on the planet. And kind of took that idea with, like, what's what's the landscape going to be maybe post-human or just, you know, post Anthropocene, you it's just going to be texturing wasteland and being like, you know what?

How is nature going to respond to that? So just kind of, sort of this sort of speculative science fiction of like insect species hybridizing with old tech, and just started to make as many different kind of invented insects as I could with, like the computer mouse is sort of the main, the main form to it or, they're really fun.

Cardboard, textiles, computer parts, wires, plastic. What else have I missed? Anything? From the, 35mm slides. Oh, yes. And tell you a little bit about that project. Yes, please. Again, like most most stories comes from like, you get access to a fun experience. There is a gallery I was working with actually reception or, Emma Katz was the director of reception, and I got an email from her like, maybe in 2012.

There was like, this looks like something that's right up your alley. You should look into it. And it was like it was an old, like, underground culture needs like newsletter, blog kind of thing. That was like advertising things happening in Brooklyn and, and yeah, it was just like a, a call from this guy, Jason Trachtenberg, who was in a band called the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players.

That's a great name. Yeah. It was, I guess they they found a lot of popularity in like, maybe the early 2000. It was a mom and dad and a teenage daughter. And their performance was they would find slide shows at, like, estate sales, and they would project them and they would, you know, create songs kind of inspired by the people they were finding in these slideshows.

So, I mean, there's like a video of them on Conan, I believe, like, so they're like famous enough to be, you know, invited on, including O'Brien. Yeah. So I ended up go and like, his his thing was like, you know, we have thousands of slides from the 50s, 6070s and 80s. We're getting rid of them. But we want to give them to an artist.

So I reached out to him and I, like, went visiting, had a cup of tea and, like, ended up leaving with just like to Ikea bags just full of it. So I didn't really know what I was going to do with them. But like, sometimes you just come across something you like. It's clear it has such a unique history to it.

Yeah. Building off of their sort of cultural imprint on the material itself. So I was just excited to have them, you know, one at a time is holding them to a window and then eventually, you know, my mom gave me like an old handheld slide viewer. Yeah, right. And I would, trigger battery which would back like slide and you would like, look through a little magnifying lens.

Yeah. I remember having one of those. Yeah. And I was like, oh, this is, you know, an upgrade in how I'm doing this and eventually put two in the viewer at the same time. And I was like, okay, that like clicked a little bit in my head of like, there's some potential here. And then it just kind of became, over time, just trial and error of overlaying two phone slides until I sort of like surreal compositions.

That are like silly and playful and like sometimes serious commentary. I don't know, there's something like, really beautiful about when you find two random sites that just, like, fit together so perfectly and like, you really have to sort out based on how transparent they are because, like, they need to be transparent enough that both images can kind of coexist, but it's just kind of like pure form of collage, you know, it's like you adding two things in their entirety and you're getting something else out of it.

And that's just really been a project that's I like having things that I can bounce around between, like, you can only spend so much time doing, like a massive installation. It takes you a year to make like that. I gotta give your brain a break. And like, I found having this kind of side out, but I'm just looking through slides or combining them is just a different part of my brain.

Right? It's like there isn't math. It's just kind of culture and context. Yeah, yeah. It's really wonderful. And I've probably collected like 30,000 slides and people like, You know, I published a book in 2018 about that project, where, I mean, it's kind of a unique project in that, like as I was showing it to people in galleries, it kind of elicited this response that I don't normally get from my work where people are like prompted to come up and tell me some story or memory that this thing reminded them of.

Oh, that's wonderful. That's really neat. Like, how do I how do I encourage that? And I just started to ask people who had bought them if they'd be wanting to write like a great piece of short fiction or poetry about the piece and knowing that they had some connection to it. And over the course of three years from like 2019 collaborators and put it all together in this book, so presented the the slide image with their written contribution.

Oh, that's lovely, that's wonderful. Oh, I have to take a look at that a little more on your website. And then I'm trying to think of what other materials might be coming out of, I have a fun series with all vaccination vials. Vaccination vials. Yeah. This is this is pre-pandemic, actually for something. So when I was squatting in that old doctor's office when I was a shop days, that office eventually became a veterinarian's office.

So I got to know the vet that moved in. And of course, people clue I know what you're doing. And he's like, I hate that I have to throw out this vaccine vials. He's like, technically either biohazard, you know, it's probably illegal to hand them out to people or whatever, but he is like, they're not really that dangerous and they're cool to look at because they just have all these different colored metal caps.

So, I mean, he just ended up giving me like a, like a Santa sack full of vaccine. So I just, I a glass or plastic, they are glass. The, the, the vial part is glass. And then there's a rubber gasket and then the caps are kind of these like squeezed metal caps, makes them like impossible to recycle because it's got three different materials kind of bound together.

What did you do with them? I essentially build frames as containers and then sort of make these patterned shapes like stacked the entire vial in there and you're kind of looking at with multicolored caps and making patterns. Oh, cool. Wow. Well, I can't wait to see what obscure material you pick out next. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for this, Ian.

This is fascinating. Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. Yeah. Well, that was an all encompassing conversation. Thank you for being here for it. I cannot wait to experience one of Ian's installation in real life sometime in the future. That would be awesome. Thank you for listening to these episodes of Savage. I hope you enjoy them. Please rate and review them when you get the chance.

I love to get some feedback. It would be really wonderful if you have a suggestion for an artist that I should interview. I welcome that suggestion as well. Just email me Natalya at Art by natalya.com or leave a message, leave a comment, or DM me on Instagram. All of those work. And if you'd like to know more about my art, check out Art by natalya.com.

If you would like to learn with me, go take a look at Eco Loop dot Art and if you are interested in being a member of the Repurposer collective, go to repurposer collective.com and join the waitlist. The doors are opening soon. April Earth Month. That's right, doors to the repurposer collective will open then. Thanks for being here.

I'll see you next time. This podcast was created, produced and edited by me, Natalya Khorover. Theme music by RC Guida.