Tricia Opstad is an abstract artist who grew up in North Dakota and currently lives and works in Missoula, Montana. Tricia makes visual art, sound art, video and dance performance. Tricia's work is experimental and expansive in nature. She pulls from her skills and training as a dancer using embodiment practices in her work. She responds from sensation, emotion, movement, and desire in combination with crafted techniques in composition and style. Tricia’s connection with the land and animals along with daily meditations in nature strongly influence her work.

Phenomenology says our very existence is established and maintained only through mutual and inseparable relationship with the world. I respond to the natural world and my living body experience, which translates to body memory and sensory maps for painting in the studio. In “Eye and Mind”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows how schemes for visibility, captured in our flesh, are at the origin of that productive and motor imagination that moves the hand of the painter.

Tricia's work is influenced by both the Dadaist and Fluxus movements. Along with deep study into history, artist philosophy, crafted composition and techniques, she appreciates the element of chance, momentary impulses, presence practices, trusting the form will develop and emerge to shape outcomes. This approach reflects a rejection of rigid artistic control and fosters a conversation with an unfolding experience in the moment.