Fred Torres Collaborations is proud to present KRADA, an exhibition of photographs and sculptures by New York-based artist Luca Pizzaroni. Pizzaroni’s work investigates how we see, transact with, and operate within modern social, economic, and geographical systems. KRADA will be on view from May 29 to July 25, 2009. Fred Torres Collaborations is located at 527 W. 29th Street on the third floor.

KRADA features work from three of Pizzaroni’s recent series. In his Landlords series, the artist addresses a frequently overlooked demographic: those for whom the street acts as a place of residence, whether primary or temporary. Images from Landlords call attention to a specific system of geography and habitation and consider the different modes by which people occupy space and claim ownership of their environment. This project has the dual function of addressing conditions of the collapsing financial market and the reconfigurations that they have effected at all levels of urban life. For Pizzaroni, the street becomes “a platform from which to observe the world in its totality and from which to get a clearer perception of reality.”

In the Avenue of the Americas series, Pizzaroni’s lens operates on an almost cinematic scale, beginning with the bustle of a busy street and zooming in to capture the exchange between a vendor and a halted pedestrian. In the contrast between the larger image of the city and the personal transaction, the marble façades of the high-end commercial buildings and the knock-off designer bags, the artist highlights discrepancies between consumer image and practice, between the pretense of luxury and the standards of production. Rockefeller Center plays host to business, tourism, and culture, but Pizzaroni shows that its function as a site for black-market exchange is equally paramount. In his careful process of mapping, this series charts the staid flow of commerce against the bursting market tributaries.

For the Labels project, Pizzaroni sought out nearly two hundred items of clothing, each one corresponding to a single country of origin. He is in the process of collecting the remaining twenty-two. The project speaks to our notions of brand and provenance and questions the role of manufacturing sources in our evaluation of consumer goods. By bringing all of the clothes together in one rack, Pizzaroni emphasizes the reality of a highly globalized market and forces viewers to reevaluate the identity of their garments, transforming “label-gazing” into a “valid geographical-psychological challenge.”

Luca Pizzaroni has exhibited both in New York and abroad including shows at KunstWerke in Berlin and the Cartier Foundation in Paris. He is the recipient of a residency at American Apparel and a grant from the Italian Institute of Culture of New York. His film and video career has included directorial work with both Elton John and Bryan Adams. In collaboration with Florian Böhm and Wolfgang Scheppe, he produced ENDCOMMERCIAL®, a definitive catalog of his visual, urban studies. The book was published in 2002 to wide acclaim. Concurrently with KRADA, Pizzaroni will participate in a group show at the Katonah Museum of Art entitled Dress Codes: Clothing as Metaphor in Contemporary Art.