Paradise Pictures

by Richard Torchia

 

December 18, 2008 - January 03, 2009

 

presented by The Montello Foundation at

chashama 266

266 West 37th Street

New York, NY 

 

Opening reception: Dec.18th, 6 - 8p

Hours: Monday - Friday 9a - 6p

Saturdays, 12noon - 6p

closed: December 25th and January 1st

 

www.montellofoundation.org

 

about the installation

The Montello Foundation is proud to present its inaugural show with the artist Richard Torchia at the chashama Window Space on West 37th St in the Garment District of New York. The Montello Foundation is an organization dedicated to supporting artists who foster our understanding of nature, its fragility, and our need to protect it. The Window Space provides an ideal location for this mission on a gritty block, far away from any nature and very populated.

 

By suggesting both a movie studio and what might appear as random, optical phenomena, Paradise Pictures frames the effects of urban tree shadows to explore the tensions between nature and culture that they demonstrate. Harnessing the combination of given conditions—winter weather, heat issuing from inside the exhibition space, and the scaffolding that currently shades the glass storefront of chashama's Window Space, the installation gives the live trees an opportunity to perform.

 

about the concept

The shadows of trees are among the most primitive examples of nature's capacity to create graphic images of itself. Unlike shadows cast by mountains, clouds, or heavenly bodies—which register to us more abstractly—the shadows of windblown trees are capable of impressive but comprehensible scale, dance-like movement, and intimate, detail. Henry David Thoreau, writing in his journal about the "rich tracery" of the shadows of elms he saw in the light of a half moon in 1851, was moved to comment that "men had got so much more than they bargained for, —not only trees to stand in the air, but to checker the ground with their shadows". Torchia is interested the ways in which such shadows, when thrown onto the flat planes of urban walls and streets, not only become more legible but also appear more ephemeral. Whether created by the sun or artificial light sources, when cropped and contextualized by city surfaces, the shadows of moving foliage take on the character of mediated, cinematic projections without losing their delicate and fugitive immediacy.

 

By suggesting both a movie studio and what might appear as random, optical phenomena, Paradise Pictures frames the effects of urban tree shadows to explore the tensions between nature and culture that they demonstrate. Harnessing the combination of given conditions—winter weather, heat issuing from inside the exhibition space, and the scaffolding that currently shades the glass storefront of chashama's Window Space, the installation gives the live trees an opportunity to perform. 

 

about Richard Torchia

Paradise Pictures extends Torchia's ongoing work with the camera obscura and his interest in the instantaneous formation of images. The project is directly related to A Beam in the Bower, a permanent public video archive of tree shadows to be projected onto the shaded wall of the Hilton Garden Inn (Philadelphia) starting in the spring of 2009. A resident of Philadelphia since 1987, Torchia has been exhibited his work in solo projects at the Institute of Contemporary Art (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1994), the Center for Creative Photography (Tuscon, Arizona, 1987), Historic Eastern State Penitentiary (Philadelphia, 1997-2001), the Gallery of Photography (Dublin, 2002) and Evergreen House, The Johns Hopkins University, (Baltimore, Maryland, 2006). Prior to this, his work was last seen in New York at Wave Hill (the Bronx) in the group exhibition "Thoreau Reconsidered".