AIPAD 2016: RICHARD TUSCHMAN

Couple In The Street, 2014

Series Title: Once Upon A Time In Kazimierz

Number of artworks at AIPAD: 1

Edition: 2 + 1AP

Size: 63"x43"

Medium: Archival Pigment Print

Year: 2014

Additional Editions: 24"x18" | 36"x24" | 5+1AP in each size.

While Tuschman continues to pay tribute to those artists who have inspired him—Balthus, Brandt, de Chirico, Vermeer—the series also demonstrates a significant development in Tuschman’s oeuvre. The artist’s Eastern European Jewish ancestors resided in the vicinity of Kazimierz until circa 1900, and this forms part of the basis for weaving together a fictional narrative with strands of cultural and family history.

Well known for his Hopper Meditations series, the artist’s process continues to be labor intensive and meticulous. The staged photographs result from a sophisticated marriage of miniature dioramas with life-size models. The sets are photographed after being hand-built by the artist over several months, with models photographed separately and composited into the scenes. The resulting photographs are visually stunning constructions, richly imbued with nuances of Jewish customs and a sense of place.

References to cinema and theatre resonate across the work. While the artworks are constructed in an exacting manner, they are also deliberately made to fall away from reality—enhancing their theatricality—and to project a level of the surreal and a dreamlike quality. Each image can also be seen to perform as a film still, with each part adding to a larger narrative arc. Once Upon a Time in Kazimierz, as a chronologically sequenced story, leaves just enough gaps and open-endedness, to enable the viewer to impose a tale of their own, highlighting in many respects, the fluidity of dreams and of memory.