Washington D.C.-based artist Trevor Young paints canvasses filled with solitary things — rooms, machines, people — all of them exercises in geometry, as parallelograms intersect ovals in the dark shadows of his brush strokes. In keeping with these geometric pursuits, Young was the recipient of the Richard C. Hess Grant in 2004, which he used to travel to Maine, Maryland and Canada to study the structural beauty of rural highways. He is also fond of painting airports and motels, two locations that embody a similar loneliness.

His first show of note was “Trevor Young Has Gone Postal,” in which the artist mailed 500 elaborately decorated envelopes to photographer Annie Adjchavanich. The artist scanned in all of the envelopes prior to mailing, and not surprisingly, several dozen never made it to their final destination, most likely intercepted and now hanging above the cluttered desks of postmasters in dead letter offices across the country. Here’s a shot of the envelopes hanging in the gallery, and here’s a scan of one of the actual envelopes.

Click the thumbs below to see full-size images of some of Trevor Young’s work, and check out his website for more info.

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