Pacific Northwest College of Art    Portland, OR

The Assist is as Important as the Dunk

“Alley-Oop!”

That’s the title of Eric Trine‘s newest exhibition, a collaboration with PSU graduate student and illustrator Will Bryant, opening February 16 at POKETO, Los Angeles. Trine, who will be graduating in May 2013 from PNCA’s MFA in Applied Craft and Design program, was profiled last year in The Oregonian.

Trine and Bryant were recently interviewed about the exhibition by Sight Unseen, a popular online magazine that focuses “on design, art, fashion, photography and other creative disciplines from the former editors of I.D. Magazine.”

Trine’s work, which is described in the interview as “so very understated, albeit with a lot of cool geometries in the mix,” makes an interesting structural canvas for Bryant’s curving, wiggling, sometimes-neon doodles. Trine’s solo work is mostly furniture, curious especially about how a room’s dressings influence social interactions. He’s spent a particular amount of time working with chairs.

When asked about the title of their show, “Alley-Oop,” Trine and Bryant explained, “In basketball, an Alley-Oop is pretty a spectacular move, and often the the player completing the move — the dunk — gets the bulk of the credit. But the player who makes the assist, who essentially sets up the play, is just as crucial as the dunker. With regards to our collaboration, those roles were constantly in flux; we made moves that pushed each other to make more spectacular dunks, tossing the ball up just out of reach, so to speak. Our collaboration was a series of moves, passes, and dunks, calls and responses.”

“Alley-Oop.” Work by Eric Trine, MFA AC+D ’13 and Will Bryant. Photo via Sight Unseen.

Trine, whose work is as much about social media marketing and product photography as it is physical furniture construction, enjoyed being able to explore the relationship between image and object in “Alley-Oop.”

“The staging and presentation is just as important as the objects themselves,” he says in the interview. “I started doing this with my furniture pieces about a year ago, as a way of departing from the standard all-white backdrop. I just started pulling found objects and other materials from the studio — plants, posterboard, etc — to create a little scene. Those scenes were more about styling the product, whereas with these situations we were more conscious of creating a formal composition.”

You can read the full interview on Sight Unseen here. They were also interviewed on the POKETO blog.

You can follow Trine’s work on his website and on Instagram, which he updates religiously, as well as follow future Trine-Bryant collaborations on their Tumblr, Formal Situations.

“Alley-Oop.” Work by Eric Trine, MFA AC+D ’13 and Will Bryant. Photo via Sight Unseen.

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