Trent Pechon
From What Lies Outside It
Senses heighten, eyes adjust as clouds pass overhead, smells of decomposing cottonwood leaves and moist soil, cool mountain spring water, and the taste of its nourishing minerals, the dawn chorus of songbirds, a cool breeze rustles tall grass and leaves in the shade of twisted trees; an understanding of my essential, primal needs rises.
My work involves transforming objects and moments of everyday life into something new and strange through meticulous craftsmanship and unexpected scale and presentation. I’m interested in how objects can communicate in ways that words cannot and help us feel and see the contradictions in our habitual ways of thinking and being.
Eternal River is a functional furniture piece accompanied by several preserved relics on the wall that together encapsulate the essence of all my explorations in the Southwest. By creating a landscape within a domestic object, I raise questions about our relationship with and dependence on the natural world.
In Poet Tree, I am raising questions about the relationship between humans and the more than the human world by granting the raw material of a tree branch agency over the finished frame. By juxtaposing the unaltered branch and the finished frame, the installation points to the shifting and arbitrary categories of art and life and nature and culture.
