Mike Treffehn
Mike Treffehn was born in Berlin, Germany, earned his B.A. from DePauw University in Indiana, and now lives and works in Philadelphia, finishing his MFA at the Tyler School of Art. Through the lenses of personal and collective histories and cultural products, his work explores the role of narrative in how we construct the worlds we live in. Utilizing a broad range of media, from performance to drawing and back through sculpture, Treffehn's work eschews the loud for the quiet, preferring instead the slow pace of piecing together fragments from disparate sources.
One of my favorite things to do is to accidentally stumble into a room where someone is reading a book out loud. If I've got a few minutes, I like to stick around and listen. The middles of stories are the best part, because you've got to furnish your own beginning and end. If I told you a story that sounded familiar, would you finish it for me? Better yet, would you start it?
Using bits and pieces of things we both might know, I set up stories that never quite settle down. They provide some raw materials and ask the viewer to see. If this sounds amorphous and vague at first, think about this—if someone handed you asparagus and barbecue sauce and told you to make a sandwich, no matter what you do, it's going to be a) green and brown, in parts, b) not the sandwich you'd probably make on your own, and c) delicious.
Let's make lunch.
