We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ian Trask a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ian , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Back in 2015, I got the idea to make a collaborative artist book. It grew out of a found photography project that I’d been working on since 2012. Through my on-going search for unusual materials, I started to acquire and use 35mm slide photographs. By overlaying multiple slides I found that I could create surreal and beguiling photo collages, which I would display in vintage slide viewers. People really responded to them, often going so far as to share the stories or memories triggered when viewing them. I was fascinated by how this body of work elicited such a strong response from my audience, so I decided to dig into this relationship further. I began reaching out to friends, collectors, and writers, asking them to respond to my slide collages in writing with little direction or prompting. Over a three year period I collected 35 stories and poems from 29 different collaborators. It was so interesting to see how everyone approached the challenge in different ways. I got glimpses into who they were, learning things that I probably never would have heard in normal conversation. The whole process really helped me to see my work in strange new ways.

Ultimately, I compiled all the stories into a single book, designed by my brilliant friend Richard Norris and his team at Project 13. The finished book is stunning, and weird. It’s something I’m incredibly proud of. You can learn more about the book and purchase a copy through my website. It’s called Strange Histories: A Bizarre Collaboration.

Ian , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a mid-career sculptor and installation artist whose primary focus is to find and use materials intercepted from the waste stream. My artwork reflects upon society’s unsustainable attitudes towards material things and the destructive impacts those attitudes have on our communities and environment. What started as a personal exploration into trash as an artistic medium, gradually evolved into an expansive collaboration with an engaged community eager to donate their discards to a symbiotic process that fosters connection through creative reuse. By design the direction of my study practice is heavily influenced by my access to people and the waste streams that surround me.

Unlike most creative professionals, I didn’t attend art school. I moved to Brooklyn in 2008, with few contacts and no experience. It took well over a year before I found anyone interested in exhibiting my work. Then rather abruptly, I got into three shows in the Fall of 2009. From that point on my career grew organically. At the time I was making a lot of large installations out of cardboard, or building intricate assemblages using materials I found while at my job as a picture framer. Eventually I became a core member of the Invisible Dog Art Center community in the Boerum Hill neighborhood. During my 8 years in NYC I exhibited widely throughout the area, including at the Spring Break Art Fair, the Figment Festival, the Affordable Art Fair, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Materials for the Arts, and Pioneer Works.

Living in New York City was challenging, largely due to the high cost of living and expensive rents. Even though I had a studio in a great building, working amongst a community of world class artists, I just couldn’t afford a big enough space for my needs. The limitation was impacting the growth and evolution of my art. This is why my wife and I left the city and moved to midcoast Maine in 2015. I was fortunate to quickly secure a spacious studio in an old mill building in downtown Brunswick, Maine that has allowed me to expand my artistic horizons. And I have found an incredible community of fellow Maine-based makers, creators, and innovators. This, paired with now living on a small homestead with 3 rescued dogs, 15 chickens, and an expanding veggie garden, is a balance in my life that I’m incredibly grateful for.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

One clear way to better support artists is to fairly compensate them for their labor. I’m not talking about sales, that unpredictable and unreliable carrot. Simply put, not all art is a sellable commodity. Many artists create experiences, like installations or performances. That type of art is not necessarily intended to be sold. It just exists, often only for a brief moment in time. Regardless, there is a clear demand for it.

As a society, we don’t hesitate to pay people who provide entertaining experiences, like performers, musicians, comedians, actors, etc. Strangely though artists don’t often get that same consideration. It is uncommon for an artist to get any money specifically for producing an art experience, even though it may have taken them months, even years, to make. On occasion, depending on the venue or host institution, they’ll get paid a modest stipend. These payments usually feel more like a small token gesture than any real attempt to consider what would be fair for the artist. While grants are available, they’re extremely competitive and require significant time and energy to put together a strong application. There’s also a tendency for a few artists to dominate this landscape because they have a certain skill set that makes them better at grant writing. For many artists, the grant process can feel like an unfair waste of time.

I understand that there’s no easy solution to this. Art spaces often work within limited budgets. And there’s the public expectation that art be free, or at least affordable and accessible for all. Ultimately in this arrangement though the burden just gets passed on to the artists, whose labor is fundamental to the vibrancy of the whole creative ecosystem. If we can change our collective mindset and not so quickly accept and enable a system that devalues artists, maybe we can start devising workable strategies for adequate compensation and support.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The biggest pivot of my life was the decision to become an artist. I was well on track to have a very different life doing science research. Science was a subject I excelled at, so I found myself drawn to it as a natural choice for my career. I had nerdy summer jobs in high school, like interning at a drug discovery company and helping out a nuclear cardiologist. I majored in biology as an undergrad, and went on to work in a few research labs in Boston and Salt Lake City. For one of those jobs it was my responsibility to manage the controlled breeding of hundreds of transgenic lab mice. It’s crazy to think about. I honestly enjoyed the work. I was technically proficient at it. I could understand the underlying ideas of what we were doing. And I loved that the research path felt fascinating and ever-evolving.

It just wasn’t the right fit. While I was good at my job, I wasn’t innovative at it. Probably most telling was that it didn’t hold my attention after work hours. I lacked that passion that drives great scientific minds. To me it was just a job. Fortunately, outside of work I maintained the creative hobby of bending forks and spoons into strange little abstract sculptures. It’s what I wanted to spend my time doing. As my creative voice got louder and more confident I realized I needed to carve out more time for it. Still, it wasn’t easy to make the life-changing decision to abandon my education, years of experience, and an obvious path forward in science. I owe a big THANK YOU to my boss at the time, Gabrielle Kardon, who was the lab’s principal investigator. She was so understanding of my dilemma and helped me to see the risks of sticking with a science career if my heart wasn’t in it. From that point on, I began to prioritize decisions that would move me ever-closer towards a life in the arts, not that I had the slightest idea of what that meant at the time.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.iantrask.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/ian_trask

Image Credits
Portrait photo by Andrew Estey