Kyle Trowbridge
Above: Pleasure Seekers (installation view), 2009
Kyle Trowbridge is a native Floridian who lives and works in Miami. His work has been exhibited internationally in such locales as Toronto, Santo Domingo, New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles and more recently as a U.S. representative at the Vienna Biennale. He received his BFA from San Diego State University in 1995 and his MFA from the University of Miami in 1999 where he is currently employed full-time as a professor in the Department of Art and Art History. Trowbridge has been featured in multiple periodicals and books whose highlights include Art in America, The Miami Herald, Ocean Drive Magazine, Miami Contemporary Artists by Julie Davidow and Paul Clemence and Miami Arts Explosion by Alfredo Triff. He has won numerous award and grants which include the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Arts and the Broward County Public Art and Design Award. His work can be found in such permanent collections as the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Lowe Art Museum and the Broward County International Airport.
Statement
For quite sometime my work has dealt with the impressionable forces we as malleable entities face in the midst of a an "aggressively evolving" modern society. I have always and continue to find the dynamic between the unknowing victim and plotting victimizer to be a fascinating one.
While continuing with these themes I am now applying them to our current culture's "love affair" with the internet. The powers that be have taken a useful tool and re-packaged it as a necessary component of our contemporary lifestyles. Now having a generation raised on this technology, with an extreme dependency and thirst for it, we seem to embrace a life that exists in this alternate cyber realm to that of actual or real. Wether it be the fantasy of virtual pornography or saying hello to a friend via a text message, it appears as if actual confrontation is to be avoided at all costs. Currently we would rather toy with a facsimile of an idea, person or place than experience the true pleasures and/or pains that come with daily life. We are in an age of technological gadgetry, which promises global connection and speed, yet our interactions with one another are extremely impersonal and can only be as warm as the glow of our computer's monitor. If there is a gain to be had with these advances, what have we sacrificed? What will the near future hold? What is our legacy to be?
These artworks function as a reminder of the world we were promised as children, and a visual record of my search for understanding in that world as an adult. The loss of innocence or purity that comes with time and these technological advances clearly illustrates the ever-changing nature of life itself. This is where I feel my art survives.