Backyard Spirits by Trevor Grabill
Lansing Art Gallery & Education Center
Jul. 8, 2024 - Aug. 27, 2022
Trevor states: “Backyard Spirits is a collection of recent relief prints. They depict aspects of everyday midwestern life through a folkloric lens, highlighting magic and strangeness in places often reduced to background noise. In the beautiful (gardens, stunning skies, gestures of friendship), the haunting (currents of oppression, loneliness, and abandonment), and the simply bizarre (weird buildings and found objects), these pieces are reminders that the world around us is neither usual nor inevitable.
This strangeness is emphasized by the medium – woodcut prints tend toward imperfection, and the wobble, grain, and noise of hand carving and printing mirror the flawed nature of the subjects.”