When walking along Hillsborough Street, heading east from NC State’s campus, one will eventually come up upon a quaint and recently renovated art museum. Named after a graduate of NC State’s College of Textiles, John Gregg, the Gregg Museum of Art & Design relocated from Talley Student Union, where it had been since 1992, to 1903 Hillsborough St. in August.

The contemporary art museum’s exhibit “Bob Trotman: Business as Usual” is a satirical interpretation of the corporate world, effortlessly using art as a powerful medium for social commentary.

Trotman is an artist and craftsman out of western North Carolina whose main form of creative expression is sculpture. Colliding two centuries of creative masterpieces, Trotman bases the style of his work on 19th-century sculptures, but creates pieces which embody modern, 21st-century themes on the ways in which power and privilege shape the world we live in.

“[My collection] is inspired by corporate culture and also the government, which leans very heavily on corporate culture,” Trotman said. “It’s mostly about the influence of money and the desire to make money at the expense of everything else.”

“Business as Usual” is a show that’s been going on for a while now but has attracted more and more appreciators each year. Trotman said that the oldest piece of art currently being featured at his show at our museum is around 12 years old.

“A lot of the work here has been shown before in other shows,” Trotman said, “and it has been collected here at the Gregg all together.”

For all of his past shows Trotman has mostly used carved wood to practice his craft. Though, more recently, Trotman said he has been exploring the use of other mediums, making his work ever-dynamic and fresh.

“Lately I’ve gotten into casting resins and fiberglass,” Trotman said. “Several of the white pieces, such as the three business men hanging in one of the galleries, are cast in urethane resin, which is a type of plastic.”

Explaining his reasoning for his additional use of other materials, Trotman said that he wanted to hang pieces of art that didn’t need to be suspended by heavy cables, which would ultimately detract from the idea that the art was floating. Fiberglass and resins are much lighter than wood, allowing for thinner, less obvious suspenders. 

More than just wood and plastic, many of the sculptures also move or emit a noise when prompted to do so by motion-sensors. The addition of kinematics to Trotman’s art allows the collection to evoke more than just a viewer’s sense of sight, proving that art can stimulate multiple senses at once.

Many of Trotman’s pieces feature faces or bodies of business men and women, each typically engaged in an ironic act or placed in a comical position. The humorous nature of his art allows for a lighter interpretation of a heavy subject.

Trotman’s larger, more plain works exhibit a sense of power and corruption in our corporate world, while the smaller and more intricate ones allow for specific examples of the injustices in business.

While Trotman doesn’t feel his work has any explicit message so to speak, he does describe it as a protest against the amount of greed that seems to be prevalent among the powerful people in our country.

While he doesn’t have a particular favorite piece out of his collection, Trotman does tend to favor his more recent works.

“I tend to be most swayed by the most recent thing,” Trotman said. “So, something I did a long time ago doesn’t interest me as much as something I did more recently. I would say that the white cast pieces are more where my mind is right now.”                  

Zoe Starling, a curator at the Gregg museum, said that concurrently running with Trotman’s exhibit – which will be running through July 8 – is a series by Arizona-based weavers. The weaving-focused group arrived on March 11 and will be staying for ten days.

“They’re going to be weaving rugs and making baskets,” Starling said. “There are two of them. It’s going to be something that I think students will like. [Students] can stop over at anytime.”

For more information on upcoming exhibits and events at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design, visit their website: https://gregg.arts.ncsu.edu/.