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Eric Troffkin
Born 1967
Lives and works in Detroit, Michigan, USA
www.erictroffkin.com
Eric Troffkin’s interests lie at a crossroads where expectations of future
progress encounter these uncertainties: can the consequences of
progress be foreseen? Is the notion of progress itself a matter of faith, and
if so, upon what foundation is such faith built?
Troffkin’s artworks mark and investigate this crossroads. They are pieces
of fi ction, composed from a visual language that recalls the commercial
products and technological objects that inhabit our architecture, dot our
landscapes, and mark our visual culture. Communications towers, cell
phone refl ectors, computer servers, and video monitors are to Troffkin as
much emblems of hope and faith for the future as they are mechanisms
involved in our daily lives. Through the reproduction, abstraction, and
transformation of such objects into organic sculptural form, Troffkin aims
to provide a focal point for considering their psychic impact.

Communications Vine, fi rst installed in 2013, is a hybrid object – a
red and white communications tower crossed with a plant. The vine
is composed from a system of modular units, allowing it to "grow" in
response to landscape/exhibition conditions and according to the logic
of its structure. There are two types of vine sections: one straight and one
curved, and each either red or white. With only these two section types,
a twisting and surprisingly organic composition is achieved, occupying
considerable space.
Wind Blown is a pair of communication towers which seem to bend and
twist in the wind at their tops. Each tower supports a single dish that is
free to rotate in the wind around its vertical axis. This motion continues
and animates the twists at the towers’ tops. Moving in the wind, the
towers seem to respond to their environment, and also to scan, search,
investigate, and interact with one another.

ERIC TROFFKIN is at heart a studio object-maker. While he chooses materials
and devises fabrication methods for their abilities to imitate the look and feel of
industrially produced items, his sculpture remains labour-intensively hand made.
Troffkin’s labour in the studio is an attempt to remove evidence of his hand in the
work - imitating a prototyping and manufacturing process through which multiple
elements are moulded and assembled. Designing “component systems,” not just
for their functionality, but with the deeper goal of discovering their unexpected
possibilities – of fi guring out how they “grow”, Troffkin draws a connection between
organic growth and wildness and the real technological objects that inspire his
sculpture, in order to provoke the question: do our industrial and technological
activities follow natural patterns, or themselves exhibit forms of wildness?

Above: Kneeling Communications Tower, 2006, Steel and Fibreglass.
h: 244cm w: 152cm d: 915cm, Artist’s Collection.

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