Chashasma is pleased to present Limited Edition, a solo exhibition by photographer/visual artist Tim Roda.

Tim Roda creates gritty black and white images that are fraught with tension- between individuals and within their public lives and private selves. In his photographs, documentary and fictive impulses don’t so much intersect as blur. Using himself and his wife and son as actors and subjects in his elaborately staged work, he positions the family unit—its mythologies and iconography—as the root of community. It’s a seemingly closed circuit with a ripple effect of public implications where private meanings freight all other interactions.

Roda has sited Roy DeCarava as an influence. The Harlem-born photographer lived there through many decades, befriended many of the prominent black artists, musicians and writers active at the time, and chronicled the lives of neighborhood residents. DeCarava began working as a painter and commercial illustrator, and many of his early photographs were meant only as reference for prints. He was drawn to photography by “the directness of the medium.” Roda studied ceramics but was also drawn to photography, using clay and sculptural elements in the elaborate and encoded sets for his work. He was inspired by the multiplicity of photography—its directness and the bending of it into ambiguity.

The imagery in Roda’s work stages working-class ethics, family traditions, and childhood memories as fragmented narratives. They are rife with mystery, melancholy, and possibility. Some are drawn from moments of personal significance, but all are enacted with universal implication. The rough-hewn and cluttered sets he creates are reflections of places from memory, like many photographs, but his overlay several memories onto one scenario. The multiples embody lineage and multitudes, of seeing different things in the same face and the same thing in different faces.

Nate Lippens – 2007