Main Gallery Space:
Artist: Tim Roda
Exhibition Title: The Butcher's Block
Duration: January 14th through February 25th 2012
Opening: January 13th at 7 pm

Tim Roda's black and white family portraits are filled with reverberations of his childhood memories and family traditions as a site of individual and communal mythmaking. Incorporating his four sons and his wife into his photographs while enacting family scenes, Roda collapses the past and the present as well as the private and the public. He positions his family in elaborately staged arrangements, which he builds out of rough and simple materials like wood, clay, paper and even 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 pictures adds to the atmosphere of hand crafted, not at all valuable and is in contrast to the usual clean cut photography. The invalidation corresponds with the content. Rodas work is beautiful and alarming. (Nasim Weiler)

Tim Roda (born 1977 in Lancaster) studied fine art at the Pennsylvania State University and at the University of Washington. His work is part of different public and private collections like Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, Austria; Gaia Collection, Turin, Italy; Elton John’s Private Collection, Atlanta, Georgia; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas; The Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois. Roda lives and works in New York / USA.