Life as art — Trent Thursby Alvey's outlook makes for intriguing art

With the Friday opening of her exhibit, "Propensity Repetition," at Phillips Gallery, and the recent acquisition of her 1992 mixed media assemblage, "Toaster Worship," by the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Trent Thursby Alvey is the poster child of the fulfilled yet always inquiring artist.

Emboldened by this duality, Alvey has been creating amazingly varied art for over 30 years — from realism to abstraction to conceptualism — offering us imagery that drinks from such idiosyncratic pools as Quantum Physics, Buddhism and Orgone Energy. "I feel driven to learn about things," she said.

Alvey believes everyone should ponder life's imponderables, "So I think that as I'm reading and just naturally investigating; my art documents what I find."

If she is going to spend the time and energy to create work based on her beliefs, Alvey wants to leave clues as to what she discovered on her journey. An example is her "Toaster Worship." The assemblage was part of the "Out of the Land: Utah Women" exhibition in 1992, which then traveled to Washington, D.C., for a show at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Earlier this year, the UMFA acquired "Toaster Worship" due largely to the efforts of Mary Francey, the museum's curator of American Art.

"In many ways it's a comment on the 1950s and 1960s," said Francey. "But I think it has less to do with her intention than to giving form to an idea."

According to Francey, Alvey's purpose was not overtly feminist. "I think she was responding relevantly to the time in which she works, her society, her culture. I think this piece does that."

Francey believes "Toaster Worship" not only fits the museum's collection, she believes it strengthens it.

Alvey's ceaseless study of man, his religions, cultures and philosophy, and her endless curiosity have impelled her to create art in many styles and techniques in many places around the world. During her career she has produced paintings, sculpture, assemblages, mixed media pieces, installations, performances and writings. Her work has dealt with such concepts as energy, form and emptiness, matter and pattern, order and, most recently, repetition.

"My current work is an exploration into the primal forces of repetition and recognition of pattern," said Alvey. "Repetition is essential. Our social evolution is woven pattern. We are repetition."

Alvey's "Repetition 35" (mixed media on canvas, 36 by 60 inches), at Phillips, is one of several large works that illustrate the artist's concept of repetitive patterns.

The exhibit will also have installations, such as "Nuts and Bolts of Wisdom."