Industrial Parkland
LE Gallery
2007

At first look at David Trautrimas's wryly conceived, exquisitely made exhibition,
Industrial Parkland, might lead you to believe this young Toronto-based artist's background
is in architecture, not printmaking. For while his large-scale digital prints certainly do
reveal the remarkable technical control and the attention to detail printmakers tend to be
good at, his work transcends the givens of its graphic manipulations. They offer, instead,
an amusing and utterly absorbing flight into the architectural imagination -- albeit a rather
beat-up, dystopian one -- where buildings that never existed before exist now, at a flick of
the transforming imagination.

Trautrimas's buildings (all of which appear to be factories) involve a witty sense of the
literally upscale possibilities for the built environment that lie in something as dumb and
abject as an old electric fan or a stapler or an old movie projector.

Like pop veteran Claes Oldenburg, he makes little things big, but where Oldenburg actually
enlarges tiny objects to gigantic size and offers them as sculptures, Trautrimas enlarges
things digitally -- his enlarged objects remain in pictures, in the landscape of the embodying
imagination.

Trautrimas builds by choosing the objects that will become his buildings (a lampshade, a
power drill), and then he simply changes their scale. How? By nestling a photo of a tiny toy
car or a small photo of a tree or a photo of a passing freight train at their feet. You see?
If this is a real, full-size train running across the bottom of the photograph, then look
how big that power drill must be in comparison -- maybe 10 storeys tall. What makes Trautrimas's
visionary photo-constructions so compelling is the combination of the seamless reconstruction
of a brand new landscape of unlikely thing juxtaposed to unlikely thing, all set down into an
absolutely radiantly convincing sense of place -- Trautrimas's digital skies, for example, are
airless planes of light, so real you can almost breathe them. It keeps his constructed
photographs from becoming cute and toy-like, and allows them, instead, an almost operatic sense
of dead-tech majesty - Gary Michael Dault, Globe and Mail 2007

Available Works:
Photoeye Gallery