 © Andrea Modica
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“I first met Barbara in 1996 when she was seven years old. She was sitting on the porch of her upstate New York home with several of her many siblings and a couple of their kids. Coming from a lifetime of urban living, I had recently been hired to teach photography at a local college. I was young, driving a car for the first time, living in a place that was as foreign to me as another country. I was desperately searching for others in this sparsely populated, rural landscape. Struck by the sheer number of people living in this farmhouse, I stopped. We talked, and I took some photographs. This began a fifteen-year relationship – really, two relationships: one pertaining to our making pictures and the other to everything else.”
-- Andrea Modica
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art2art is delighted to present Andrea Modica:Treadwell. This critically-acclaimed body of work was taken in and around the tiny town of Treadwell, New York on and off over a fifteen-year period. The pictures evoke a dream-like existence populated by children, and, just perhaps, seen through their eyes. Secret places, solemn moments, solitary rituals, offerings, reliquaries: these are the signposts of a sensitive child's imagination and memory, and the subject matter of these timeless, unforgettable images, beautifully contact printed in platinum. In the perceptive words of the Met's Maria Morris Hambourg:
“Modica's art is about important and solemn events – those internal, molding moments we are mostly powerless to hold or to articulate. Modica seized such a moment with Barbara in 1986, and although she has turned her camera on other subjects in the past decade, this beautiful plump child became her touchstone to revisit over the years, and, eventually, the main character of this picture story.
At the outset of the story we witness the power of vision: the emotions elicited in the observant child as she relates to events outside her disclose her sensitivity and establish the moral climate of ‘Treadwell.' The artist then paints the landscape and the rites and mysteries of its local tribe – the animal spirits they worship, defame, and sacrifice. We see how close to nature these people are, how they interact with each other, and then, as their culture matures, how they become conscious and project images of themselves. They elaborate their embodiments with cosmetics and devise more complex rituals using scarification, masks, and icons.
Towards the end of the story, the scene changes to a sacramental realm where transformation, death, and spiritual grace may enter, or be revealed as make-believe. Modica leaves us here where the imagination reigns because that is where she lives – the domain of art, the artist's home.”
An MFA graduate of Yale University , Andrea Modica is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright-Hays Research Grant. Her work from Treadwell is in the permanent collections of the nation's leading museums. |
