Backyard Spirits | Trevor Grabill
Exhibition & Events
Trevor Grabill
July 8 - August 27, 2022
Reception: Thursday, July 14, 2022 from 5 - 7 PM
This exhibition is generously sponsored by Hude Legal Services, PLLC.
Artist Bio
Trevor Grabill is a woodcut printmaker, muralist, and teacher in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Their work focuses on finding and illuminating strangeness and magic in everyday life. They’ve spent most of their life in small cities around the Great Lakes region, and this area, with its intersection of beauty and neglect, is a constant inspiration for them.
Their work has been shown in galleries across the U.S., including solo shows in Kalamazoo, Michigan and Duluth, Minnesota, as well as a two-person show in Buffalo, New York. They’ve also taught at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts since 2014 and have given workshops in Saugatuck, Michigan; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Duluth, Minnesota; and Finland, Minnesota. Their murals are featured prominently at Kalamazoo’s Vine Neighborhood Association and Lansing, Michigan’s Elm Park, a part of Lansing Art Gallery & Education Center’s public art program, ArtPath.
Artist Statement
Trevor states:
"Backyard Spirits is a collection of recent relief prints. They depict aspects of everyday midwestern life through a folkloric lens, highlighting magic and strangeness in places often reduced to background noise. In the beautiful (gardens, stunning skies, gestures of friendship), the haunting (currents of oppression, loneliness, and abandonment), and the simply bizarre (weird buildings and found objects), these pieces are reminders that the world around us is neither usual nor inevitable.
This strangeness is emphasized by the medium – woodcut prints tend toward imperfection, and the wobble, grain, and noise of hand carving and printing mirror the flawed nature of the subjects."