Tim Roda / Living Large
We are pleased to present our second solo show with photographs by Tim Roda.
Tim Rodas black and white family portraits are filled with reverberations of his own childhood memories and family traditions as a site for individual and communal mythmaking. Incorporating his son and wife into his photographs while enacting familial scenes, Roda collapses the past and present as well as private and public. He positions his family in elaborately staged arrangements, which he builds out of rough and simple materials like wood, clay, paper and everyday items. His latest work explores themes of transition, whishes and dreams as well as the isolation of immigrants. Like memories the images are fragmented narratives, in which familiarity and strangeness blur. His technical process seems appropriately unfinished. He roughly cuts the borders of his photographs so that they look vulnerable and he allows or even creates chemical splashes and other technical flaws. This treatment of the pictures adds to the atmosphere of hand crafted, not at all valuable and is in contrast to usual clean-cut photography. The invalidation corresponds with the content. Rodas work is beautiful and alarming.
Tim Roda was born 1977 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA.
Please see “Introducing Tim Roda”, by Dan Torop in Modern Painter Issue 56, May 2008