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| Laurie Trok a mountain keeps an echo deep inside |
“Live the questions now.”
It is all within the question, moving outside of certainty, challenging borders. I want to create images that are freed from stasis. How can I allow them to move and interact and continue to do so? I am interested in creating a synesthetic experience that allows for time and process to spell out questions, poems, to haunt viewers with melodies, to remember dreams.
For the past few years, I’ve been working with cut paper. Paper is both delicate and surprisingly strong. It is an illusion; it plays with ideas of space and time, both in the action and in the process. I am interested in the time it takes to painstakingly cut out an image, you can see this passage of time immediately in the work. I like to make drawings into objects, to see the shadows it can make, to allow it to form visual poems as it dances with other paper objects. I study calligraphy; I write nonsense languages. I make blind contour drawings - I love the questions they contain. I am obsessed with ambiguity because it is our reality. Narrative is ever changing, and so I allow for that. I plan for it. Improvisation drives me forward.
Line can become sculpture, if you make it so. Shadow can become drawing. Processes bleed into one another as do mediums, be it poetry or music or dance. This is how I look at the world and how I approach my art-making. I am becoming more enchanted with balance and flow, with taking the immediacy of an abstract expressionist sensibility and then carefully extracting that action. Stopping it for a moment in time, letting it move someplace else. There are questions that lead to more questions. Perhaps imagery tells these questions in ways words cannot. Since my art is physical, I can turn it over, like a question in my mind. I can look at both sides.
I am cutting paper forms and imagining them as enormous metal sculptures. I am actually working toward making that a reality. But can also see them as microscopic forms, and so they become templates of possibility, a form for a fractal that can mimic itself until it becomes one giant “it”. It is skeletal, alien, ancient, and playful, nostalgic and yet present. I honor error in my work, and strive tirelessly toward a balance between questions and answers.
Laurie Trok - Bio
Laurie Trok is an abstract visual artist born and raised in Pittsburgh’s Carrick neighborhood. She studied flute performance at Duquesne University and attended Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts. Studying music kept leaving her longing for a more physically creative medium to work in, and she found herself becoming among other things a creator of art.
She has worked as an assistant to Isidro Blasco, a Spanish sculptor based in New York City. While in New York she also assisted Oliver Herring with several performances at Muelensteen Gallery in Chelsea.
She has been working with cut paper for the past few years, before that working primarily with found materials and objects. The cut paper installations and small works focus on time and language and creating visual abstract representations of poems, songs, dreams, and memories. Laurie recently returned from an Artist in Residence program at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. It was there she was able to foster momentum to build larger scale paper installations and developed at interest in extending the works into other media.
Her work is being featured in 50 Contemporary Artists, a book by Tim Phelan to be published in 2013.
For the past few years, I’ve been working with cut paper. Paper is both delicate and surprisingly strong. It is an illusion; it plays with ideas of space and time, both in the action and in the process. I am interested in the time it takes to painstakingly cut out an image, you can see this passage of time immediately in the work. I like to make drawings into objects, to see the shadows it can make, to allow it to form visual poems as it dances with other paper objects. I study calligraphy; I write nonsense languages. I make blind contour drawings - I love the questions they contain. I am obsessed with ambiguity because it is our reality. Narrative is ever changing, and so I allow for that. I plan for it. Improvisation drives me forward.
Line can become sculpture, if you make it so. Shadow can become drawing. Processes bleed into one another as do mediums, be it poetry or music or dance. This is how I look at the world and how I approach my art-making. I am becoming more enchanted with balance and flow, with taking the immediacy of an abstract expressionist sensibility and then carefully extracting that action. Stopping it for a moment in time, letting it move someplace else. There are questions that lead to more questions. Perhaps imagery tells these questions in ways words cannot. Since my art is physical, I can turn it over, like a question in my mind. I can look at both sides.
I am cutting paper forms and imagining them as enormous metal sculptures. I am actually working toward making that a reality. But can also see them as microscopic forms, and so they become templates of possibility, a form for a fractal that can mimic itself until it becomes one giant “it”. It is skeletal, alien, ancient, and playful, nostalgic and yet present. I honor error in my work, and strive tirelessly toward a balance between questions and answers.
Laurie Trok - Bio
Laurie Trok is an abstract visual artist born and raised in Pittsburgh’s Carrick neighborhood. She studied flute performance at Duquesne University and attended Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts. Studying music kept leaving her longing for a more physically creative medium to work in, and she found herself becoming among other things a creator of art.
She has worked as an assistant to Isidro Blasco, a Spanish sculptor based in New York City. While in New York she also assisted Oliver Herring with several performances at Muelensteen Gallery in Chelsea.
She has been working with cut paper for the past few years, before that working primarily with found materials and objects. The cut paper installations and small works focus on time and language and creating visual abstract representations of poems, songs, dreams, and memories. Laurie recently returned from an Artist in Residence program at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. It was there she was able to foster momentum to build larger scale paper installations and developed at interest in extending the works into other media.
Her work is being featured in 50 Contemporary Artists, a book by Tim Phelan to be published in 2013.
Exhibitions
Breath and Shadow May 2012
Solo exhibition, Espresso a Mano, Pittsburgh, PA
Don’t go back to sleep December 2011
Solo exhibition, Morris-Levy Gallery, Pittsburgh,
PA Portals July 2011
Solo exhibition for Pittsburgh Cultural District Gallery Crawl, Planned Parenthood, Pittsburgh, PA
VIA October 2010 Audio/Visual Festival, Pittsburgh, PA
Visionary Arts Festival August 2009 Schenely Plaza, Pittsburgh, PA
Penumbrae May 2009
Collaborative temporary installation with Andres Ortiz Ferrari, MONK’s, Pittsburgh, PA
Free and Easy, Take 2 January 2009
Garfield Artworks, Unblurred, Pittsburgh, PA
Relevant Experience
Artist Assistant/Apprentice 2008-2010 Isidro Blasco, Brooklyn, NY
Performance Assistant October/November 2010 Oliver Herring – “Areas for Action”
Residencies
Artist in Residence September 2012 Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont
Publications
Selected Artist Coming Soon 50 Contemporary Artists by Tim Phelan
