TREY WRIGHT

Trey Wright‘s collages are how you’d expect someone with an unorthodox slant would recreate reality. They also show the many objects that occupy Trey’s day-to-day thoughts (legs, plants, strange fruit) and how he transforms them into cultural commentary. 

Read on for what the Texas-born and -based artist has to say about his select pieces (according to slideshow order):

Big Hair. I usually don’t take pictures of people or figures, but this one fell together very naturally. It very much corresponds with the collage pieces that I have created, it dissects the person into their basic parts—hair, legs, hands. I think it is a very silly picture and the bright colors that I like to work with contribute to the circus feel of the image.

Legs. This was a picture I created to go with the Big Hair picture and expanded the narrative possibilities of the first image, it really opened up the potential to grow that story. The image of the legs blurs the lines between reality and created image.

Rafflesia. When I initially set out to do the images, I was creating these collage paintings of plants that I thought resembled human hands, silhouettes, legs. I really liked the idea of giving life to these plants and  inanimate objects. I missed creating photographic images, and the way I found to bridge that gap was assembling what I call the specimen dishes of the things I might find in these collage landscapes I was making, the Rafflesia was one of those first images.

Strange Fruit and Green Collage. These two play around with the idea of a disassembled collage. instead of combining various bits to create something new, I will keep the piece all separated—it sometimes ends up looking like an explosion of some parts of a machine. I search through magazines, flyers, advertisements to find the perfect grouping of shapes—this can take hours or days to find the right match.

Trip to the Cape with Tiffany. Because so much of my source material is taken from fashion magazines, my imagery has been really influenced by the photographs in these publications—there is no escaping that fact and how people will read them because of that. I think that my images, this one in particular, do turn what is normally thought of as something very serious into an image that is playful.

Tony. I like to combine three-dimensional and two-dimensional objects in a lot of my work, I’ve found that it contributes to a surreal reading of the work, and I enjoy throwing people off with the cast shadows and shine of the magazine paper.

Happy Accident. This is one of my favorite images because it combines so many things that interest me: combining real objects with print images, color, and an ambiguous narrative. Color is very important to me, I often think about that before I think about anything else in the picture. While in school, I used very little color—everything was beige—and I think getting out of school, I felt the need to confront the things that put me out of my comfort zone.

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