Trent Alvey has been around for a bit. When she first appeared in the pages of 15 Bytes in 2003, she was already an established artist. (But if you’ve known Alvey long enough, you can imagine her interjecting: an artist should never be established, she would say. […]
“Open wide the floodgates / wash away extractors from the shore. / may we never again measure / this body by economic value. / may we count our blessings / by the flaps of wings. / may we be the ancestors who stepped / in the path of […]
For a couple of magic years during her adolescence, I drove my step-daughter to and from school five days a week. During those shared moments, one of her favorite things was to tell me her dreams. Eventually I realized her narratives went on far too long for her to be remembering them: that she had, in fact, returned to the dream state and was telling me the dream as she witnesses it continuing. The literary novelist, Robert Olin Butler, describes the process of artistic creation just so, as dreaming while awake, and I realized that I’d had the rare privilege of witnessing that process in play.
That description comes close to accounting for the art of Trent Alvey, in that her works are rooted in abstractions and resist ascribing them to subject matter.
Looking ahead to retirement some years down the road (her husband’s, that is; artists just don’t), Trent Alvey knew that the office building the couple had invested in near West High in Salt Lake City’s Marmalade District would go on the market and the massive amount of her […]
[dropcap]One[/dropcap] of the most compelling breakthroughs in modern linguistics, and a necessary step on the way to proving that language has become genetically programmed in humans, was the realization that all people everywhere speak essentially the same language. Made up of words and rules for combining them, it […]
In 2013, Trent Alvey was selected by 200 of her peers as one of “Utah’s 15 most influential artists.” The following profile appeared in Utah’s 15: The State’s Most Influential Artists, published by Artists of Utah in 2014. Every day Trent Alvey walks up the hillside near her home […]
Two feisty spirits with plenty in common makes for an interesting friendship, one that can be traced back to when Claudia Sisemore was Trent Alvey’s uber-cool creative writing teacher at Hillside Junior High. Their artwork, though, has less in common, which makes for an interesting show at The […]
We introduce our new podcast, The 1-5-B, with an interview with Trent Alvey discussing her work in the exhibit Tourists of the New Sublime at The Granary Art Center in Ephraim.
New York and London’s David Zwirner Gallery just closed a show by the West Coast video artist Diana Thater that The New York Times called “spectacular”. Salt Lake City artist Trent Alvey, who herself blends art and science in her work, says a news release from the gallery […]
In 1975, British feminist artist Mary Kelly, along with Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt, completed a comprehensive conceptual art project called Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry. Part sociological study, part conceptual art, the book and documentation indexed the lives and daily schedules […]
Someone has decided that the Trustees of Westminster College shouldn’t be looking up Trent Alvey’s dress. That seems like a self-evident, uncontroversial proposition. But the dress is actually a work of art Alvey created in 2007, and has been hanging in the Giovale Library as part of the […]
A recent trip to the Springville Museum of Art, where I visited the In Memoriam exhibit dedicated to four recently deceased Utah artists, spurred in me, rather naturally, thoughts of mortality; in addition, I began to think of generations and their passing, particularly artists. Not that these four artists […]
During the month of February, Salt Lake City artist Trent Thursby Alvey explores the relationship between earth and sky at the Kimball Art Center’s Badami Gallery. After first being approached about the exhibit, Alvey gave her show a working title of “Tibet Series” even though she had never been […]
Trent Thursby Alvey creates installations combining sculpture and paintings. Her work is interactive and investigative bringing together art and science in a new dialog.
Michael McLane is the man behind the Utah Book Festival, which this month is bringing authors and book lovers together across the state. But he’s also a writer, and in this companion piece to our podcast on Trent Alvey, Amy Brunvand takes a look at McLane’s Elik Press publication Trace Elements: Mapping the Great Basin and its Peripheries.
The opening of Work To Do, an exhibit at the BYU Museum of Art that features the work of Trent Alvey, Pam Bowman, Jann Haworth & Amy Jorgensen, will also feature dances by choreographers created specifically for the space.
Our Delicate Ecosystem, on view at Phillips Gallery through September 11, continues the enduring environmental mission of gallery owner Bonnie Phillips. It is a cohesive collection of photography, mixed media, painting, sculpture and more that—in and of itself—creates its own “delicate ecosystem” of art, mirroring the exhibition’s theme […]
Although I said nothing aloud at the time, I was disappointed in the recent Spirituality and Religion exhibition at the Springville Museum of Art. It seemed as though the show’s title had been reversed. While there were countless narrow images of specifically Christian traditions, and even more of […]
We’re all about bright ideas. Like that first bright idea, almost 25 YEARS AGO: create an online platform to unite and strengthen Utah’s art community. And the even brighter one: in the face of dwindling coverage in traditional media, create an online magazine about the arts in […]
