Grotto

Slought Foundation, a non-profit organization rethinking contemporary art, is pleased to announce "Grotto," a camera obscura installation by Philadelphia-based artist Richard Torchia. The exhibition will be on display in the front gallery at Slought Foundation from April 5, 2007-May 30, 2007. The opening reception will take place on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 from 5:00-7:00pm, with a public conversation with the artist at 6pm. Please note that this installation is dependent upon natural light conditions and may change over the course of the day.

Since 1990, Richard Torchia has worked extensively with the camera obscura, the oldest photographic device, developing customized applications in specific locations and organizations in relation to available subjects and views. Instead of recording "live" imagery, as with chemically fixed or digital photography, Torchia relies upon primitive optical systems. His approach is grounded in extensive research, experimentation, and the artist's reverence for conditions as given. The work seeks to "perform" that which is being depicted, through the act of viewing its formation as a live image.

In Grotto, Torchia's installation at Slought Foundation, the artist turns the gallery itself into a large, reversable camera that takes itself as its own subject. Using a variety of different lenses mounted within portable cabinets and screens, the installation presents the viewer with a series of complementary views of the storefront window at the front of the gallery, as well as the flow of illuminated water dripping from the utility sink at the opposite end of the room. During daylight hours, the frosted glass panel in the gallery storefront serves as a screen to receive live, inverted images projected by a lens focused on Walnut Street. At the other end of the gallery, a lens directed at the porcelain sink on the back wall projects an enlarged, inverted image of the water dropping from the tap, as illuminated by a spotlight. A third lens in the middle of the space that is directed at the storefront window "corrects" the inverted projection of Walnut Street on the existing screen and reframes it as part of the interior of the gallery. As a result, in the evening, viewers standing on the street will be able to witness a live view of the gallery interior--including its dripping faucet-- projected on the frosted screen in the storefront. These live projections thus make subjects of an empty gallery, as well as the pedestrians that may or may not become its viewers. Foregrounding in this way the various conditions of spectatorship, the work becomes a literal response to both the physical venue that is Slought Foundation, as well as its curatorial program that is grounded in interventionist approaches, problem solving, and critical practice.

Based in Philadelphia, Richard Torchia (b. 1958) has developed projects for Historic Eastern State Penitentiary (1997-2001), Evergreen House (The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 2006), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1994), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990) where his work is included in the permanent collection. In 1997, the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, Arizona) presented a suite of live projections entitled The Waving of Foliage, the Coming and Going of Ships. Torchia has also exhibited his work internationally in group exhibitions such as "Container 96" (Copenhagen, 1996), "EAST International" (Norwich, England, 1997) and "Pilot2," in conjunction with the Frieze Art Fair (London, 2005).

In 2002, he collaborated with architect John Toumey on a project for the Gallery of Photography, Dublin. A Key to the Garden (2002-05), his pavilion for at the Morris Arboretum (University of Pennsylvania), invited visitors to study an inverted panorama of the Butcher Sculpture Garden. A Beam in the Bower, a permanent public video projection that throws a 60-minute loop of hundreds of tree shadows against a 28 x 281 ft. wall in a darkened underpass, will open in the summer of 2007. Grants include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1994) and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. Since 1997 he has been director of Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, Pennsylvania.

Grotto
Featuring Richard Torchia
kuratiert von Osvaldo Romberg