David Trautrimas

In his sculptures, installations, public projects, prints, and digitally manipulated photographs, David Trautrimas envisions the future—or what people from the past imagined the future would be. In his “Spyfrost Project” series, for example, he merged sculpture, photography, and Photoshop techniques to create scenes of fictional, futuristic-seeming military installations set within moody landscapes. The images are based on Cold War-era industrial design and its utopian promise. Trautrimas composed each structure from disassembled household appliances, explaining that his “devices of destruction are assembled from the very appliances that promised deliverance to a post-WWII paradise.” Similarly, for his “Habitat Machines” series, he dismantled, re-assembled, photographed, and digitally manipulated items such as vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, and mixers into forward-looking, imagined housing complexes. A fascination with the ways in which architecture, design, and industry shape people’s lives and expectations underpins all of Trautrimas’s work.