– COMMUNE NETWORK / Creative/Artistic Director / Producer –
“… the love child of Martha Stewart, MacGyver, Al Gore and Keith Richards. It’s a spot-on (if highly implausible) characterization: Trice is artistic, handy, an avid recycler and a shaggy-haired fan of chunky jewelry.” — Psychology Today Magazine.
There is definitely a lot of Mad Max meets Charles & Ray Eames in my work when it comes to my furniture. But furniture is becoming more a thing of the past as I find my newest direction developing in REFITTING old buildings with inspiration, statements or even into usable spaces once again. I believe the American Dream brought upon us, in a lot of America, a dystopian world with hulking reminders of a past we no longer have access to or the benefits of.
I do not want to become overly bleek so there is almost always whimsy in my REFIT ideas for these monolyths of a terminal past.
That whimsy fused with a simplicity and a refined beauty help me to beauty to sometimes harsh truths. That combination of beauty and whimsy also awarded me a spot on Time Magazine’s GREEN DESIGN 100 list (a list of the top 100 green designers to keep an eye on in the future). This significant increase in scale has been growing since I returned home to Pittsburgh. I find almost all my inspriation now focusing more on public installation and refitting larger structures. All of this with a greater clarity of vision regarding the relationship between the human race and planet earth in the past, present and most of all the future. The catalyst for this evolution is my official move of my studio home to Pittsburgh. I am thrilled by the new inspiration I am finding here and how my work is already transforming.
Inspiration is all around but I particularly lift a glass to all things Mid-Century modern. The Eames and Mies van der Rohe to name a couple of the designers. Miro with his reimagined natural forms filled with his own exuberance made me weep at The Tate Modern so he is forever inspiring in ways I have yet to completely understand. Picasso’s found object sculptures, Frank Lloyd Wright with his, “If I had another fifteen years to work, I could rebuild this entire country, I could change the nation”, and to include the dark side of me and humanity: Edward & Nancy Keinholz.
AND last but not least, Buckminster Fuller who said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller is deeply compelling to me and probably one of the greatest of my inspirations.
Building that new model is what I’m here to do. And if I do it with whimsy, graphic boldness and with refined beauty doesn’t that make the hard truth go down so much easier?
Spoon full of sugar, right?
Rodney’s presentation: Tech and materialism in the middle of a polarized world
Rodney’s workshop: A lamp is a lamp is a lamp, right? Not if manufacturing them is what you do for a living.