David Trautrimas
Fenestrations
November 26 - December 20, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 26, 5-9PM
Artist in attendance
REGISTER FOR ADVANCE PREVIEW HERE

During a recent creative lull I re-watched many of my favourite films, finding myself drawn towards those that dug into the meaning of home. Two films that stood out, The Wizard of Oz and My Own Private Idaho, used the home as a psychic construct rather than a purely physical space. Dorothy’s home carries her into a hostile unknown, while Mike longs to arrive at one he never really had. This connects to Bachelard’s idea in The Poetics of Space that a house is the first cosmos, the space where the self is formed, and I’m fascinated by how both films dramatize what happens when that primal space is destroyed or withheld.

This fascination helped bring me out of my creative furlough and led to Fenestrations, a series of laser-sgraffitoed works on glass. These works contemplate my own experience of being removed from this primal space of home following a personal loss. They depict the inevitable changing of the places we once physically inhabited and continue to metaphysically inhabit.

Because the works are on glass, the title Fenestrations is both a nod to the physical material and a metaphorical window into these houses. Each house is structurally peculiar and lives in a staticky midnight, making uncertain the structures that should feel familiar. Behind the bright windows are the obscure happenings of inside, a multitude of small moments that accumulate into a self. Together they are both vessel and content of a home now only accessible as gloaming memory.

Both Dorothy and Mike, aware or unaware, find a path through the kindness of strangers. The elaborate gate in Fenestrations may be my way forward. I don’t think it opens to heaven, as I agree with The Talking Heads that it’s “a place where nothing ever happens,” but rather to a road. Perhaps a road built of the bricks found all through this work, a quiet black-and-white yellow brick road. At the beginning of it is that metaphysical first house, and down it is a new one you may not know about yet.

Fenestrations is a series of new works by artist David Trautrimas. David Trautrimas’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in Canada and internationally including solo exhibitions at The Canadian Embassy’s Prince Takamodo Gallery, Tokyo; dnj Gallery, Los Angeles; Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto; Hartell Gallery at Cornell University, Ithaca New York; and Eckhart Gallery, The Hague. His works have been shown at public art institutions including The Korean Art Center, Seoul; Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Toronto; The Art Gallery of Hamilton; The Gardiner Museum, Toronto; The Art Gallery of Windsor; and Queensland Center for Photography in Brisbane, Australia. His work may be found in numerous public and private collections including The New Mexico Museum of Contemporary Art, Foreign Affairs Canada, Microsoft, GO Transit and the Bank Of Montreal. This will be his first show with Art Sales + Services at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.