Trevor Van den Eijnden

Vancouver-based visual artist working in photography, the photographic,
sculpture, installation, text, bookwork, video, and paint.

I describe my work as a remembrance of the future, an anticipation of the past
and in that pursuit I make salves for dark subject matter.

Follow me on Instagram for more frequent updates and studio explorations:
@tvandeneijnden , or see my about page for other contact information.

On view now

salves for grief
The Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver, British Columbia.

This exhibition brings together two connected bodies of work: super saturates and a salve for grief. Both begin with beauty, but stay with more difficult feelings: awe, uncertainty, loss, and the strange pull of the Sublime.

In super saturates, Trevor Van den Eijnden transforms photographs of landscapes affected by smoke and atmospheric change. He does not invent new skies, but intensifies the colours already present, creating hypothetical future landscapes. Drawing on scattering events at sunset, and 500 years of landscape painting made after major volcanic events, the images imagine skies altered by fire, heat, and climate change. At first, they feel vivid, seductive, and almost candy-like, drawing the viewer in through colour and beauty. But the longer we look, the more uneasy they become. These glowing skies point to a future where such sights may become increasingly familiar.

In a salve for grief, language becomes something physical and shifting. Words appear through vantablack-painted 3D forms, or through light, reflection, and dichroic colour that changes as the viewer moves. These works approach grief as personal, relational, and ecological. They suggest that loss is never fixed; it changes with memory, distance, and time.

Together, the two series use beauty as a lure. Colour, light, and shifting surfaces draw viewers in before revealing more difficult questions about grief, environmental change, memory, and loss. The Sublime appears here as both attraction and unease: something beautiful enough to hold our attention, and troubling enough to make us confront what we might otherwise turn away from.

Other works

More information

a
soul
is
not
made
of
atoms

^{Video documents}

^{Trevor Van den Eijnden
Solo Exhibition
2020}

^{The Reach Gallery Museum
Abbotsford, British Columbia}

^{Episode 01: TIME}

^{The first of three video curator-led tours by Gallery curator Adrianne Fast, and Kate Bradford, featuring photography by the artist, and SITE Photography.}

^{This video focuses on a series of photographic works, Super Saturates, that explore ideas of time: “time disappears at a quantum level—all time exists all the time”; “a remembrance of the future, and an anticipation of the past”.}

^{Episode 02: NATURE}

^{The second of three video curator-led tours by Gallery curator Adrianne Fast, and Kate Bradford, featuring photography by the artist, and SITE Photography.}

^{This video focuses on a series of shadow, and light-centric works, Familiar Strangers, Sham–Real Shadows, and The 24 Intervals, that explore ideas of nature, solastalgia, design, and art. “Morris would’ve argued that human design needs to be combined with nature, that those two things need to be intertwined”; “shadows are an echo of a real object, in the same way, a designed representation of nature is a kind of echo of nature itself.”}

^{Episode 03: GRIEF}

^{The third of three video curator-led tours by Gallery curator Adrianne Fast, and Kate Bradford, featuring photography by the artist, and SITE Photography.}

^{This video focuses on a series scultptural works—The Relics, and Shored Lines—as well as text works —a salve for grief—that explore ideas of grief: “although these works present a future that is dark, and more dark”; “seems to extend forever into an indeterminate space…and infinite time”; “embodying an anxiety of the present moment”; “replaced actual nature with plastic replicas of it”; “reminding us that grief is never static—it is always something lived with, and through over time”}