The Steve Keene Trevor Reese Project at Copy
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, aliens communicate with Richard Dreyfuss by sending him the impulse to create a mountain.
Trevor Reese recently had the impulse to create a mountain in Copy Gallery. Inside Trevor's mountain are three "baby mountains" or models of mountains made of welded metal bars. Trevor also revealed that he is in the process of creating a paper mache mountain for another gallery somewhere else. All this is evidence of the fact that Trevor Reese has been making a Dreyfuss-worthy amount of mountains lately.
I am in no way saying that aliens are trying to communicate with Trevor Reese, but what I've always liked about the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is that, minus the aliens, it illustrates the weird obsessive end of being an artist. Artists always get motifs stuck in their heads, even without aliens. Jackson Polluck mysteriously created splatter paintings for years, Monet painted many haystacks, Andy Warhol printed an abundance of soup cans, Deborah Butterfield continually sculpts horses . . . granted, some of this could be explained by the laws of supply and demand as I'm sure all of these men and woman had many eager consumers of splatters, haystacks, soup cans and horses. . .
But you have to wonder, if no aliens are telling you to make a mountain, why make a mountain? There may not be a real answer to all of this, as I don't think anyone has ever successfully answered the question of why we have impulses to create art objects in the first place, but my theory is that a mountain is impressive. It's a landmark. Something to get out of bed and go see. A mountain will always call a person, inspire people to climb it, to travel to it, to be near it. A mountain is a muse for the entire creative process, it looks great but doesn't have any real use but to get in the way and make your life a little harder (or more fulfilling--if you aren't feeling cynical today).
I like to think of Trevor's mountain as calling people to Copy Gallery, where, after climbing three flights of stairs, they will reach their goal. After traveling around the mountain, visitors will even be able to purchase cheap souvenirs of their adventure, in the form of 3 for $5 Steve Keene artworks.
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