Roberts & Tilton is pleased to present Trending, an exhibition of new work by Evan Trine.

Evan Trine’s photographic practice presents new perspectives on the familiar. Though formally varied, his projects frequently manipulate the roles of individual elements so that the formal, conceptual and technical aspects of photography are transferred, or translocated to the final object. By eschewing traditional darkroom chemistry for digital processes, his work is directly linked to the software and digital tools used to create it.

Trine’s methodology broadens his interest in aspects of process, language, and materiality, regularly incorporating the use of common references as source material to investigate object relations. Content, ranging from old family photographs, newspaper headlines, portraits of friends, and images of second-rate paintings – are manipulated by computer to create the most condensed, simplified, essential version of that visual data.

Trine’s series of color grids conceptually explores this translation of information, where the artist takes traditionally ‘understandable’ imagery and then transforms it to different configurations; the end result is an image paradoxically being a complete representation while divulging nothing of the referent. The Headline pieces parallel the ideas driving the color grid works; that is, reformatting groupings of data to create a formal abstraction. However, instead of taking imagery and reading it as information - reformatting and presenting that data - Trine uses text as the work’s referential source.

While individually selected for their phenomenological impact, all works are derived from news sources. The end result is a contemporary snapshot, or visual newsstand, of popular news articles and images over a period of twelve months.

Despite the possibility of identical reproducibility, each image remains a unique piece; digitally printed, mounted on aluminum, framed in maple.

Evan Trine holds a MFA from Claremont Graduate University and BFA from Azusa Pacific University. Trending marks Trine's first exhibition with Roberts & Tilton.

A publication produced by the artist will be available throughout the duration of the exhibition.