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New York Times Household Appliances Inspire an Artist's Vision of Home by Penelope Green © New York Times March 5 2009

David Trautrimas, a 30-year-old Canadian artist, takes apart old kitchen mixers, hole punchers, waffle irons, staplers, vacuum cleaners, coffee machines and other household objects; photographs the pieces; and then “reassembles” them digitally, into what he calls “Habitat Machines.” With their industrial steampunk aesthetic and looming, animated postures, his machines would fit nicely into the sets of Terry Gilliam’s clanking dystopia “Brazil.” Or perhaps post-crash Dubai.

Mr. Trautrimas became interested in the idea of creating fanciful dwellings unfettered by zoning ordinances or the laws of physics, he said, after noting the blandness of most residential development. “What Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid are doing on a commercial scale would be so cool if it was happening residentially,” he said.

He also enjoys spoofing the marketing come-ons of new condo developments, which typically — or “at least here in Canada,” he said — depict an idealized version of the new building set in a rolling meadow. “You know it’s in downtown Toronto,” he said, “and not in any wilderness.”

Two of Mr. Trautrimas’s digital “Habitat Machines” are included in “Visual Morphology,” a show opening Thursday at the Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn.

Globe and Mail Gallery Going review of Habitat Machines By Gary Michael Dault © Globe and Mail October.11.2008

This edition of Gallery Going is all about distressed and derelict buildings and cities. Some of them are real. Some are fictitious. Some lie halfway in between.

First, to The Habitat Machines of Toronto-based artist David Trautrimas - now at Toronto's Le Gallery.

Trautrimas's digital prints of forlorn structures, complexes and communities begin as photographs of castoff, abject, superfluous objects like old coffee pots, electric razors, oil cans and waffle irons, which he then repositions by re-imagining them at vastly different scales. His Electric Razor Co-operative, for example, looks like a modernist high-rise apartment complex. The structure's perforated, semicircular façade, however, clearly betrays its origins as an old electric razor that, with an assist from Trautrimas's skill with Adobe PhotoShop, is made to look 30 storeys tall.
It's the same with his dark, brooding Waffle Iron Heights, wherein three tarnished waffle irons are shoved together to make a convincing mega-structure soaring up into a dark, overcast sky like some chillingly gigantic tower from Fritz Lang's film Metropolis.
Trautrimas's dystopian buildings seem to begin cheerfully enough. A self-confessed magpie, he tells me he picks through garage sales, scours flea markets and monitors eBay auctions, chasing down household objects that he deems transformable into prodigious edifices. "I look for signs of wear," he tells me on the phone from his studio, "for objects with a good patina." For Trautrimas, scratches, dents and missing parts are gifts, not liabilities.
When Trautrimas gets his harvest of household junk back home, he sets the items up and photographs them against a neutral, white Foamcore background. He then roams the city again, taking thousands of photographs of lawns, windows, driveways, parking lots, light standards and sidewalks - the infrastructural bric-a-brac upon which he feeds - and then, back in front of his computer, painstakingly creates settings and environments in which his pseudo-buildings will eventually be placed. "Sometimes," he says, "I've had to combine five different curbs to make one sidewalk."
Given his cheerful pursuit of a computerized building program (other structures bear names such as Sprinkler House, Coffee Pot Towers and Space Heater Place), it's surprising how sombre and even sinister the finished ink-jet prints seem. There is a broad axis of caustic wit and wary charm running through each of the works. Take an elaborate piece like The Measurement District (pictured here). Despite the perpetual twilight in which the eccentrically shaped buildings of the "District" sit, under that threatening sky, it is amusing to note that the disc-like building at the right began life as a bathroom scale, that the twin towers at the centre are isolated parts of an industrial scale, and that circular structure at the left is made up of the parts of an old Big Ben clock no more than four or five inches in diameter. And yet the buildings grumble away in a sort of pre-apocalyptic gloom, apparently abandoned and, if not actually condemned, then certainly unwelcoming.

 

Ion Magazine Interview by Jen Selk April 2007© Jen Selk & Ion Magazine jenselk.blogspot.com/

Dave Trautrimas is adorable. This becomes obvious almost immediately after he enters the small café diner where we are scheduled to meet in Toronto. The 29 year old artist, originally from Belleville, has got the flattered, eager to please manner of someone who’s never been interviewed before (he admits as much). It’s sweet, but it won’t last. Trautrimas’ work is as detailed and striking as that of some of the most popular visual artists working today and he isn’t likely to remainin obscurity for long.

Titled Industrial Parkland, Trautrimas’ most recent show opened at the LE Gallery in Toronto at the beginning of March. It features 11 large digital prints with names like Power Drill Factory and Stapler Factory all constructed in a way that Trautrimas describes as “kind of like hyper collage.” Basically, he’s taken everyday items like a fan, a lamp, and the aforementioned stapler and drill, meticulously dismantled them, photographed their individual parts, and then digitally manipulated those photographs into new images that look like huge, urban factories. Each factory is implied to produce massive quantities of the items they’re made out of. Get it? I don’t really get the “hyper” part of “hyper collage” so I ask. Trautrimas explains that most people think of collage as work that combines disparate source images. “I’m doing a similar thing, but taking it to the next level by creating my own source images in a really controlled manner, and using them to create a collage that is much more seamless than a typical scissors and glue approach.”

The show at LE Gallery is only Trautrimas’ second solo exhibition, but he says he’s already made a departure from his previous style. “I’d say a lot of the apparent humour is gone,” he says, explaining that much of the work he completed before (some while he was a still a student at the Ontario Col-lege of Art and Design) was more “whimsical” and “leaning toward the old Monty Python work of Terry Gilliam.” That influence is still vaguely apparent, but Industrial Parkland is also definitely something different. It’s more grown up, much like Trautrimas himself, more serious than you might expect, and extremely precise. Every review I’ve read so far manages to work in some reference to architecture in order to describe it.
Trautrimas worked for a good eight months on the project, holing up in his apartment in order to get it done on time (and still had to ask for an extension from the gallery). “There were definitely times that I was really stressed about the project,” he says. “I can’t speak for all artists, but I think there’s always a healthy fear that the body of work you’re creating has the potential to completely flop.” Luckily, by the time Trautrimas and I spoke, favourable reviews of the show were already cropping up in local and national publications. Trautrimas is pleased at the positive reception, and likely more than a little relieved. At the show’s opening, he says one visitor stood in front of his Automobile Factory piece—the largest work in the show at 37” x 60”—for an extended period of time, and finally remarked that he could actually “hear it” operating. It one of the nicest things anyone has said about his work, ever.


Personally, what I like best about Industrial Parkland is the retro styling of the items Trautrimas chose to work with. There’s something particularly appealing about the palate of older items—the pewter of the blades used in Oscillating Fan Factory and the light amber of some of the ancient bulbs in Lamp Factory. “I’m an obsessive junk hunter,” Trautrimas admits, describing himself scouring local Value Villages and other second hand shops in order to find new materials to dissect. He even took apart his own car (an ’88 Toyota dubbed “the dung beetle”) to make a piece. Sometimes, he admits, he buys higher end items at the sort of Toronto antique stores that cater to the movie industry, and after dismantling and using them, will return them for a refund. He’s obviously a little abashed about it, but I’m complimentary. After all, he must be ridiculously handy, technically inclined and careful if he’s able to mess with so many different mechanical and electrical systems without ruining them. “Not really,” he says, smiling, and as ever, charmingly modest about thewhole thing.

 

press for "Industrial Parkland" March 2007 LE-Gallery© Globe and Mail Arts March 10/2007. By Gary Michael Dault
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.

 

MAJOR MORPHINGS - Trautrimas's reconstructions fascinate
NOW Magazine March 8/2007. By David Jager
It's hard to classify David Trautrimas's astonishing send-ups of industrial scale. They're not prints, illustrations or photographs, though they contain elements of all three. They verge on pure whimsy, yet they pay meticulous attention to mechanical detail and architectural form.
The images are digitally modified but rely heavily on the raw physicality of the objects depicted. In other words, Trautrimas's work is something new. He disassembles and rebuilds regular household gadgets such as drills, staplers and toasters, then photographs them as if they were full-scale industrial sites. A toaster becomes a toaster factory or perhaps a brutalist mining station. An oscillating fan, set against a distant fog-shrouded tree, looks like the forlorn skeletal remains of an amusement park.
The original scale of the objects is reconfigured by means of mechanical and Photoshop wizardry, and the resulting fantasy appliance buildings look huge, weighty and not a little age-scarred, wedding our nostalgia for the aesthetic of obsolete industrial artifacts to a dystopian retro-futuristic sci-fi vision. They're eerie and unsettling, seeming both hyper- and unreal.
Trautrimas's use of small objects to summon up images of huge and improbable structures evokes several kinds of associations: the fetishism surrounding household objects, the constant task of reimagining the city through architecture and the pleasures we take as children in fantasy microcosms. Trautrimas's methodology brings some images to the verge of being over-polished and self-contained, a clever visual joke in danger of exhaustion.Yet the final images are so startlingly novel and fun, you want to believe in them.

 

©artpost.info Walking The Line #46 The Drill Factory March 11/2007. By Gary Michael Dault
There is a hair-raising magic inherent in the concept of scale-change.  Both Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space, 1964) and Susan Stewart (On Longing, 1993) have written persuasively about the charm and the phenomenological engagement generated by the idea of the miniature.
Here is Bachelard, quoting Cyrano de Bergerac—I quote it because I find it irresistible—on “intimate immensity”: “This apple is a little universe in itself, the seed of which, being hotter than the other parts, gives out the conserving heat of its globe; and this germ, in my opinion, is the little sun of this little world, that warms and feeds the vegetative salt of his little mass” (p.151).
The true connoisseurship in miniature-ness may well belong to children whose unselfconsciousness, until the onset of puberty and its strictures, allows them the continual production of ravishingly beautiful drawings, paintings and sculptures (maybe “structures” is a better word if we’re thinking about tree-houses and snow-forts).  It is during this hallowed eleven or twelve years, as well, that children exert, for their delectation, their prodigious abilities as scale-changers.  What pre-pubescent girl cannot transform a doll-house into a full-size mansion at the flick of her shaping imagination?  And what little boy, lying on his side on the carpet or on the grass, cannot instantly transform a toy car or truck, train or airplane (do boys still play with actual physical toys anymore or is everything digital/virtual?) into the real thing (in thus regard, by the way, it’s important to be lying stretched out beside the miniature object; if you’re standing over it looking down, the toy is automatically consigned to perpetual smallness—with you as its giant).
But children are not, obviously the only proprietors of scale-change; that gleeful prelude to creative enchantment rests also with artists, architects and other keepers of creative fervor.
The opposite of miniaturization is, of course, enlargement, and the coursing between them is a two-way street: it is a shock of pleasure to scale something up (the entire career of the senior American pop-artist, Claes Oldenberg, was based on his one perceptual operation).  It is also creates a shock of pleasure to make something that is big in a small version—think of all those miniscule Eiffel Towers and CN Towers tourists find so compelling.
At any rate, small-to-big is a potent formula for perceptual re-presentation, and one of the most accomplished recourses of its transformational energies informs the immaculately imagined and accomplished exhibition called Industrial Parkland by Toronto-based artist David Trautrimas, now at Toronto’s Le Gallery.
What Trautrimas has done—to describe it makes it sound too easy—is to have selected certain rather worn, grubby, even abject household tools and appliances (power drills, a stapler, an old toaster, television parts, an old film projector, and so on) and, by photographing them in juxtaposition to, adjacent to photographically reduced images of automobiles, passing trains, and so on (there is a lot of photographic—that is to say, digital—push-and-pull in Trautrimas’s work), to have generated entirely new and remarkably fresh “industrial” landscapes.
The new landscapes (there are eleven in the exhibition) are, more accurately, “factory-scapes”: the photographs have concisely descriptive titles like The Television Factory, The Projector Factory, The Organ Factory, The Lamp Factory, The Stapler Factory, The Toaster Factory, and The Oscillating Fan Factory (some of the titles carry the faint whiff of surrealism that is the almost inevitable by-product of the artist’s gleeful selecting of some delightfully unlikely objects to make into “factories”).
Trautrimas’s abject household objects naturally maintain their shapes when they are giganticized by his digitalization of them—but by that same giganticizing process, their shapes lose the meaning of the precision of their outlines as they are fitted into the artist’s aggregational positioning of them: a power drill—as in The Drill Factory reproduced here—is not as much a power drill now as it was at the beginning, before it was juxtaposed to other factory” parts (including a second, symmetrically positioned power drill).  Now, the individual tools have become elements of the hypothetical whole and take their place in complexity.
Note how cunning Trautrimas is in his fabricating of settings that lend his new scale-changed “buildings” believability: the most enchanting moment of The Drill Factory is surely not the big-little drills themselves, however delightfully re-contextualized, but rather the “convincing” truck, which having now digitally attained the scale of a toy truck, has backed in under the “factory.”  The tree is a nice touch too—and the “driveway” at the left.

 

"A Confederation Of Alloys" October 2005 LE-Gallery© National Post Saturday October 29th 2005. By RM Vaughan

My sources tell me that hard-core print enthusiasts are less than impressed with young printmaker David Trautrimas's foray into digital printmaking. Trautrimas's silkscreens, the argument goes, are much truer to printing form than his digitals. Purists are such a bore.
Anybody who can walk away from Trautrimas's new collection computer-enhanced (plus some worm-spit induced) prints without giggling at his inventive, playful vision is either a total crank or too busy obsessing over technique to admire the finished product. Yes, yes the silkscreen prints in the show look more like traditional prints (because, um, thye are), and digital printing can't truely replicate the dreamy washes of saturated colour that silkscreening lavishes on paper, but Trautrimas's images, both the digital and the traditional, are so much fun to look at that I quickly forgot to care.
Viewers of a certain age will see traces (indeed, entire footprints) of Terry Gilliam's Monty Python cut-and-paste animations in Trautrimas's wacky collage concoctions, especially in works such as the helicopters made out of oil cans, egg beaters and flatware, or in the flat iron souped up to look like a hot rod. But in his smaller, less hectic works, Trautrimas sets aside the goofy visual puns and airs for a darker, more meloncholy brand of anarchy. In either case , these busy but precise works are never less than skilfully crafted, and are pleasingly loaded with infectious, bouyant tomfoolery.
Printmakers are an incestuous, often persnickety lot - I suspect it's all those toxic inks infecting their bloodstreams - but even they can't begrudge a young artist's desire to experiment. Especially when the prints-that-aren't "proper" prints are livelier than the average etching.