Gerry Trilling is a conceptual artist who presents a personal recounting of the history and assimilation of the American Jewish Diaspora in exquisite deadpan. Her parents escaped the Holocaust, relocating to St. Louis where she grew up in a community of immigrants viewing identity, assimilation and belonging as linked to home environments and material culture.

While Trilling uses a variety of fabrics to mark the passage of time, she is not nostalgic. She embraces our contemporary material culture, itself omnivorous in the extreme. Nothing is off limits in her unsentimental investigation of the passage from greenhorn to assimilation. Materials, patterns, certain numerical codes are her conceptual signifiers. Her work insists that you, the viewer, reach into your own personal place of memory and association.

Gerry Trilling earned a BFA in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute. She has studied weaving, dyeing and paper making, and traveled extensively collecting materials and conducting independent studies in Asia, South America, Australia and Europe with an emphasis on how patterns fit into the larger visual landscape. A summer in New York City engendered a profound awareness of infrastructure, its constant fragmentation and integration relative to memory, fear, anxiety and societal impact. She is currently engaged in a three year residency at Studios Inc in Kansas City where she will be presenting a large installation based on family history and material culture in May 2017

CV/LINK