Meet Ian Trout | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ian Trout and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ian, what role has risk played in your life or career?
This question reminds me of an article by Jon Regardie published in 2023 by Los Angeles Magazine. The article went through some of the data from the California Department of Housing and Community Development’s 2023 State Income Limits paper. Here are some relevant lines that illustrate some of the economic realities folks live with here in Los Angeles:

“Over the last decade, we’ve seen affordability hit a new crisis level in Los Angeles County.”

“As incomes have shriveled in L.A., critical costs — like rent, mortgage rates, and gas — have rocketed to sky-high levels.”

“An estimated 63% of Angelenos lease their home, almost the opposite of the national picture, where the homeownership rate is 65.9%, according to U.S. Census data. The high price of renting in L.A. puts a distressing amount of the average Angeleno’s take-home pay into housing. The 2021 American Community Survey found that 30.9% of renters in the county were spending more than half of their income on rent.”

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
There are two quotes from the painter Roy Lichtenstein, the first one goes, “Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.”
And the other is, “I’m not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don’t really want it to carry one. I’m not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way. ”
So there’s that as an approach to art-making and what art can or cannot do.

To explain a broad source within my practice I’ll use two moments from an interview with the author Patrick Blanchfield in Jacobin. He is attempting to explain the United States’ addiction to violence; something we see daily on both individual and structural levels.

“We can look at sort of a what you might call the libidinal economy of the United States in the contemporary moment: these interesting configurations of fear and anxiety and blame-making, and these constant shifts of position and projection, which ultimately boil down to the production of a status quo that changes only insofar as it gets more brutal and crueler.”

“Is it about arms manufacturers in the twentieth century? Is it about the frontier, by which they usually mean the Old West? Is it about the Civil War and slavery? In fact, it’s about all these things layered on top of one another. Once you can view the present situation as a complex output of cumulative developments — stacked over time, competing with one another, or producing certain types of synchronicity — you get a lot more clarity.”

So I work somewhere in this contradiction between the form and its content. Our reality feels increasingly asynchronous so I am attempting to wrangle something from that quandary; to pull some narratives out of that. I’m interested in how our society legitimizes violence on all levels to uphold inequality. A lot of my work uses images and language extracted from thinking about these things.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Heres a list of places I like and might take friends; in no particular order and mostly places to eat or drink.

Cacao Mexicatessen
Alias Books
On Maritime Records
New Beverly Cinema
Queen St.
Los Angeles Police Museum
Lodge Room
Las Perlas
Capri Club
Musso And Frank

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Here a few books, podcasts, films that have informed my recent work; shoutout to the authors for their intensive analysis of these subjects.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler
Power by Yance Ford (a documentary from 2024)
The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton
Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America
Black Masculinity and The Cinema of Policing by Jared Sexton
The End of Policing by Alex Vitale
Amerika by Franz Kafka
Ethics in the Real World by Peter Singer
Running From COPS by Dan Taberski (a 6 episode podcast series from 2019).
Logo Modernism by Jens Müller
Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power by David Dayen.

Website: https://www.iantrout.com

Image Credits
Artwork documentation by Ian Byers-Gamber
Artist portrait by Jonathan Welles