The WHY Conversations
Trickhouse – guest curator/producer, 2014

In 2014, Trickhouse was a rambunctious 5-year-old. It continues to be an online journal that publishes and exhibits a vast wealth of variables in the arts, devoted to the generative nature of collaboration and a crucial offering to audiences of the inquiries of independent curators.

To commemorate a half-decade of collecting, I sifted through hundreds of creative eruptions, some compelling for their very oddity. Others were less jagged at the edges, but also less categorizable. The distillation to five artists (plus Trickhouse’s head curator) reflects what resonated and intrigued me, and, particularly, engaged my own proclivities towards material combination.

Participatory boundaries are vague: who is maker and who is consumer? An artist is a curator. A curator can be a storyteller. The bricoleur prevails. These artist dialogues are a melding of voice and sound.

“Tell me a story about an epiphany, a moment when you discovered your current approach to art-making,” I asked Caroline Bergvall. Her hesitating response traveled to my ears across an ocean and a continent: “No … never … no, there’s no strike of the match, nothing but pleasure and that can be epiphany itself.”

The ultimate WHY lands on the creative impulse itself. Writer Fanny Howe says it’s a form of promiscuity or wanderlust.

Artists/Interviews/Portraits

Kevin T. Allen: sound-film
… the sound is inescapably internal sounding …

Caroline Bergvall: voice + installation
… there’s a muscularity to the text …

Alexandra Eldridge: painter
… if you were an animal, what landscape would you thrive in? …

Helen White: visual poetry
… there’s an element of illegibility and I think of it as silence …

Additional Interviews
Visit The WHY Conversations

Ed Bowes: Why film
[text Q&A]
… my films are becoming more book-like …

Noah Saterstrom: Why curate
[Trickhouse head curator + Joan Schuman, guest curator]
… it could be like wandering down a back street in a busy city …