Evan Trine

Region: MFA Annual

Website: http://evantrine.com

City / State: Long Beach, CA

My work is directly linked to the software and digital tools I use to create it. I gather visual source material—old family photographs, newspaper headlines, portraits of friends, images of paintings I don’t really like—and manipulate it on the computer to create a condensed, simplified, essential version. While keeping the entirety of the digital information intact, I create abstractions to force a new perspective on the familiar. The result is a series of formal images that are direct translations of the source data, with all the information presented in a new form. The removal of origins leaves the viewer with echoing sensations and a vaguely mathematical experience—an understanding that these shapes and colors aren’t solely fabrications of the artist’s mind, but stem from a more concrete source. They ultimately exist in a balance, being wholly representational while divulging nothing of the referent.