#trey wright

After seventeen issues that were not about soup, Lucky Peach is back to its roots, bringing you pages and pages and pages of information about hot broth and slippery noodles.

Take a look inside the PHO issue. 

Trey Wright graduated from the University of North Texas and currently living and working in Dallas, Tx.

      There are many layers to your photographs: there are the objects or products, the photographs of these products used for sale, the studio collaging or arrangement, and then a final re-photographing. Where do you fit in? How do you feel rephotographing a photograph?

I've always held a fascination for photography but coming from a background in design I think my initial relationship to the medium has been that of reference material, a foundation to build from, and photography being a tool alongside other elements. I've worked so long not being the author of the photographs I've been working with that I think it no longer registers to me as something I shouldn't be doing or moving away from--though I have take images where I am behind the camera. When I take a picture of another photograph, I feel like I am a witness to something. I would rather arrange things that are around me to photograph, but there is a lot of work that goes into that arranging--sorting through imagery, construction before the final photograph. I see myself being an arranger, I arrange photography to illustrate ideas I have about the world around me.

    What is your favorite color?  Why?

If I had to pick one it would be red because it relates to physical desire.

    Is there a line between advertisement photography and art photography?  Are there two such opposing forces or should there even be a  distinction?

There are a lot of similarities between the two. Both use compositional tricks to hold a viewers attention, both communicate some kind of message and they both will meet a similar kind of demise. The questions do become much richer when working on a personal project, questions that cannot always have a place within a commercial assignment. I'm less interested in answering questions in my fine art practice.

Is your work funny?  If so, what does that do for the artwork?

I think that the work is funny. Placing a nipple next to an arm, next a fly, next to a jewel creates a fun juxtaposition and irony in some cases. The cutting out of an image can also exaggerate a subject beyond what the original image was capable of and I think there is something funny in that. Humor helps me to get the viewer to linger on an image longer. I'm not always interested in creating a very dark statement about images shuffling around on the internet and losing their context. I would rather see the humor in that.

How does your commissioned work relate to your video work, your video  work to your studio work, your studio work to your portraits? Do they  enhance each other?

Most of my studio work has come about because of commissioned work. Sometimes I've really needed that push to get myself to start working on studio work again. I will use the commissioned work to test out different ideas. I started working on my series Totem because I was left with all these cut out accessories and that got me interested in setting up these shrines to them, figuring out how they would function as works of art. The portraits I've taken so far have been exercises in composition. I want to retain that sense of playfulness, simplicity and color in the portraits but I view most of them as affirmations that I have a command over my medium and that my true voice voice lies in constructed imagery. Though, I think what is interesting about most of the portraits I'm drawn to that I've taken is that there was something about them that I had no control over. That also makes them a respite from having so much control over the subject. I've been wanting to do a video for sometime and I was given the opportunity with a commissioned assignment to start testing that out, figuring out how I would exactly got about approaching the making of a video. I'm still figuring ways to utilize video in my fine art practice but it has opened up an entirely different type of output for my work. My video work so far has been influenced by my photographic work, the idea of layering and how that relates to the larger idea of how we experience images.

The Eye from trey wright on Vimeo.

  Is your work social or political in nature?

The work features a lot of sourced images, so to evade the implications of that I think would be impossible. 

My work takes the images, warps them and represents them in these kind memorials to something that is passing. I've used for the most part one specific type imagery to illustrate this--advertising imagery. I like this subject matter because it flip flops between being something that is permanent and impermanent, beautiful and garish, personal and impersonal. I see a strong correlations between this type of subject and photography. 

Ask yourself a question and respond.

What is a piece of advise you have been given over the years?

I'm not sure exactly what the best advise has been but I do know the strangest. The strangest piece of advise was from a professor at the end of my first semester. The advise came stapled to the grading sheet of our final semester project, it was on a ratty piece of notebook paper and scrawled in black ink. The writing was nearly unreadable and had to re-read several times to make out what the words were--You can't fake freedom.

It felt rather cryptic and I could never really figure out what he meant by it.