A curator first and foremost
Kristy Trinier also an artist in her own right
“I knew the instant they told me which vertebra it was,” Kristy Trinier recalls.
It was Valentine’s Day 2008 when Trinier, then 28, got the news that her father, Mark, had been in a serious car crash. He was driving to Calgary from his hometown, Whitecourt, when he hit a patch of black ice and rolled near Innisfail. Mark broke three vertebrae — C6-7 in his neck, and T8 in his mid back — and badly damaged his spinal cord.
Trinier, who had worked as an aide for a paraplegic woman during her undergrad studies at the University of Victoria, knew about spinal injuries, understood what her dad’s accident meant: quadriplegia, wheelchair, caregivers. It was a game-changer for the young woman, a mover-and-shaker in Edmonton’s arts scene who since 2013 has worked as curator at the Art Gallery of Alberta.
At the time of the accident, Trinier had just moved to Edmonton for an exciting new job as public art director for the Edmonton Arts Council. But she wasn’t necessarily planning to stay here. The Whitecourt native got the travel bug young, thanks to her parents, who carted her and her brother all over the country on family road trips. After UVic, Trinier worked in various parts of Canada and abroad, including The Netherlands, where she did a Master’s in public art at the prestigious Dutch Art Institute.
But once she knew her dad, then 55, was paralyzed from the shoulders down, she decided she had to stick close to home.
“For me, this was like, ‘I’m staying in Edmonton’,” she says, sitting in the living room of her bright Norwegian-inspired peaked-roof home she helped design and build so it would be accessible to her father, whenever he and her mom, Debbie, come in from Whitecourt for visits or medical appointments.
Trinier is still pinching herself about her role at the AGA. Her duties include curating throughout the galleries, including the RBC New Works space, Manning Hall in the gallery entrance, and AGA exhibitions at Enterprise Square Galleries. She also alternates with Catherine Crowston, executive director and chief curator, in facilitating touring exhibitions.
“It’s really fun to get to think about art all day long, to read about art and write about art and have access to the (AGA) vaults, the collection.”
She’s also busy curating Future Station: the 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, an exhibition surveying Alberta’s contemporary art scene. The show (Jan. 24 to May 3, 2015) will feature 42 artists from across the province that Trinier hand-picked after making dozens of studio visits. “I feel very much that I have a great responsibility, but it’s a privilege in the best sense of the word,” she says of the task. “It was really interesting to get to look at the province with fresh eyes, to look at what it’s like to be an artist in Alberta today. I feel really lucky.”
“The upcoming Alberta biennial will be a great opportunity to see Kristy’s full potential as a curator,” says Blair Brennan, manager of the University of Alberta’s Fine Arts Building Gallery and a contemporary artist. “There is already an interesting selection of artists so I’m looking forward to seeing that show.”
Trinier, 34, is an artist in her own right who exhibits installations, sound and video art that is highly conceptual. In one project, called Psychic, she recorded a visit with a psychic onto vinyl, juxtaposing a discussion of the artist’s future with its existence as a physical document of the past. More
“I feel very much that I have a great responsibility, but it’s a privilege ...”
KRISTY TRINIER
recently, she did a video project called The Blind Leading the Blind, in which she wore a mask and no glasses while walking one kilometre up a mountain road in Switzerland (where she is working on her doctorate by distance). She has shown her work internationally, and seven years ago was one of the artists to participate in the Alberta biennial she’s now curating. In 2009, she won the Emerging Artist Award at the Mayor’s Celebration of the Arts. She is also co-founder for the Alberta Public Art Network and has played a pivotal role in a multitude of public art initiatives.
John Mahon, the EAC’s former executive director who hired Trinier, says she’s had a strong impact on the city. “Edmonton’s arts community is united as a community, which doesn’t mean they’re always holding hands and singing, but they’re raising vigorous debate,” he says. “And Kristy’s not one to not say anything — she gets right in there. She really does have a big picture in mind, she sees the whole thing, the need to create, to maintain, to talk, to reach out, and she is tireless.”
A curator first and foremost, Trinier isn’t daunted by the inevitable lack of consensus from the arts community on her decisions. Her job requires confidence, critical thinking, resilience.
“I can articulate an idea and not everyone is going to accept it, and I’m OK with that.”
“Once she gets something in her head she’s pretty much unstoppable. She holds her positions with real conviction,” says Mahon.
While at the EAC, Trinier wrote the Master Plan for Public Art that’s now used as a guiding document for the management of the city’s Civic Art Collection.
“John Mahon gave me a big chance by making me a young public art director for a big city, and I’ll always thank him for that,” she says.
“I really loved that job, but ...” Trinier pauses, brushes biscotti crumbs off her fingers. Her nail polish is bright turquoise. She gathers her thoughts, explains how the AGA gig was something she just couldn’t pass up. Her background in arts administration at the Banff Centre plus her seven years with the EAC were pivotal in landing her “dream job,” as she puts it.
“It’s the kind of work I thought I’d have to leave the country to do. I really love it. The main thing is I don’t have to defend art anymore.”
By that, she means she’s preaching to the converted inside the provincial art gallery. Before, she was working with public art, “and that was the hard thing, defending the right to have art in the public sphere.”
Trinier’s modern, uncluttered home is a work of art in itself. She worked hard, saved her pennies to make it happen. The white walls, paintings and artfully placed curios more than hint at her occupation, and the house’s barrier-free design is practically invisible. You’d have to look hard to even notice wheelchair-accessible features: spaciousness, wider doorways and hallways, a roll-in shower, a medical bed in the front guest room that also serves as Trinier’s office.
“My brother and I wanted them to have places to go. Otherwise the world gets a little small,” she says of her mom and dad. Brent, her only sibling, moved to Calgary from the United States to be closer.
Showing support is the least Trinier can do for the parents who always supported her interest in art growing up in Whitecourt. When she was a schoolkid, the family camped in a tent trailer on the outskirts of Edmonton during the summer holidays so she and her brother could attend art camp at the AGA (then known as the Edmonton Art Gallery).
On family holidays, “if we were near an art gallery, they’d take me. My parents always wanted me to tell the stories of the exhibitions. If I was interested in something, they were.”
Choosing to stick close to her family is symbolic, she says. “As a creative person, in order to be sustained artistically, I feel you should give as much as you get.”
“I don’t think she’s being held back staying in Edmonton,” her father Mark Trinier says by telephone from Whitecourt. Now 62, he remains quadriplegic, though has relearned to breathe and regained some movement in his arms and fingers after years of rehab and an experimental treatment he received a few hours after his accident. “This is where the opportunities are. There are so many things happening in Edmonton in the arts world. As long as we can see the will of the politicians and the citizenry in that direction, I think you’ll really see it grow.”
Says Trinier: “I want to have a challenge and it’s nice to have that in my hometown.”