Trek Thunder Kelly
Trek Thunder Kelly is a Venice, California based artist, born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He began his art career nearly twenty years ago, conflating media into coherent, subversive, and consistent messaging, while commenting on the imaginative and tangible worlds of our culture’s incessant consumption. These impressions manifested through paintings, sculptures, and year-long performance art pieces delving into the boundaries of art’s interconnections with the real world. Trek wore a tuxedo every day in 1999; then donned electric blue the year he ran for Governor of California in 2003 as “Reality meets Art”, gaining international attention; in 2006 he became an interactive walking poem, wearing one word each day in a harness on his chest...his audience watching the poem unravel over the course of the year through images on his website.
As his art career blossomed, he moved into a gallery on Abbot Kinney and was an integral part of the street’s emergence as “the hippest in America” according to GQ magazine, an originator of "First Fridays", and co-hosting celebrity-filled parties with Vanity Fair, Red-bull, Sky Vodka, Campari, and others. Perhaps Trek’s most ambitious feat came 6 years ago, when he sold nearly everything he owned, walked away from his gallery, and told his friends and family he was disappearing for 2–5 years. He was gone for almost 3 and a half years, at his own expense and alone.
Before his first year, Trek traveled to Jerusalem where a half-blind beggar chose 12 countries for him, he then spent a month in each of these countries, symbolically delivering a key to the most inspiring 12 individuals he encountered. The second year, curious about solitude, he lived in a hogan and was a shepherd on and off the Navajo reservation. Midway through the year, seeking even more seclusion, he edged into absolute isolation on BLM land in New Mexico. There he built his own adobe shelter, brought nothing to read or write with, no fire, sleeping bag, tent, or flashlight. Each morning he watched the skies, during the day he hiked the twisting canyons, and for months he communed with the spirits of his imagination. The third year, almost entirely broke, and relying on donations and the goodwill of those he encountered, he launched into his final art piece, “The Good in America”. In his 60s van, “The Chief” he spent a week in every American State, hiking to waterfalls, visiting museums, sleeping at over 100 Walmarts, and meeting amazing people across the country...seeking and finding, the good that binds us together.
He returned to Venice and has been living in his van ever since—part of what he calls his “Homefree” Micro-living project. Of course, he parks blocks from the ocean, and concentrates primarily on painting occasional murals, working on his books, and actualizing various projects he finds inspiring.
While combined, this may sound on the edge of sanity, for Trek it’s a purposeful exploration of existence through art. He has a ravenous thirst for pushing what art is and what it can be. If examined though dialogue and a breadth of perspectives, his art is a catalyst for a broad and deep kind of cultural self-awareness. It is one man’s creative map for how to live.