Exhibition Review: Richard Tuschman “MY CHILDHOOD REASSEMBLED”
Early Morning © Richard Tuschman/Courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York
Written by Lara Southern
In his latest exhibition, My Childhood Reassembled, artist Richard Tushcman examines the formative years of his youth through depictions of his childhood home in the 1960s. Digitally collaging the live model “stand-ins” that he uses to represent his family members into self-crafted miniature dioramas, Tuschman creates a complex narrative through images that reflect his own mixed emotions surrounding his upbringing.
Tuschman’s interest in painting and assemblage as well as photography led to Tuschman’s experimentation with the processes of digital imaging that began in the 1990s. Since then, with projects including Hopper Meditations and Once Upon A Time Kazimierz, the artist has cultivated a signature style, fusing the real world with carefully constructed digital realms of his own making.
Company At Dessert © Richard Tuschman/Courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York
For this highly anticipated series, which Tuschman describes as a “visual memoir,” the artist constructed and then photographed a selection of vignettes from his childhood, based on old family snapshots and his own memories. An accomplished craftsman, all the sets captured are handmade miniature replicas of portions of his Midwestern suburban home, the interiors of which he describes as “stubbornly esthetically mute.” He then assembled a collection of actors to assume the roles of his family members, whom he photographed before digitally imposing them on the images of his constructed sets.
Pondering Life At Age Four © Richard Tuschman/Courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York
The resulting images, though seamlessly integrated, posses an eerie aura of disconnection; the characters, in spite of being quite literally inserted into the manufactured environment, feel emotionally removed. Some of the photographs feel whimsical, like the bird’s-eye shot of a little boy sitting on the living room floor watching a black and white television, while a young girl lies, daydreaming, on her back amongst her scattered toys. Others, by contrast, feel more mysteriously melancholy, such as one in which the artist’s mother sits in the darkened living room and stares out the window, her husband standing across the room in his dressing gown, both completely disengaged with one another. The light from the street pours in, casting ominous shadows about the room, highlighting the smoke from the woman’s cigarette, which remains perpetually lit throughout the series. The TV, as always, is blaring into the dark.
Television Test Pattern © Richard Tuschman/Courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York
The sleepy sadness of this, and several other images depicting Tuschman’s mother and father, is intentional. As he puts it, ”When I think of the kitchen linoleum floor, I remember wondering, with a mix of anxiety and curiosity, about the mysteries of my parents’ marriage, trying to make sense of their hushed tones as they spoke quietly in that room when my father came home from work late at night.” This introspective reflection is applied to his sibling relationships too—“the complicated, mixed feelings I harbored towards my siblings, who were alternately my best friends and arch-rivals.”
Tuschman’s choice of the title My Childhood Reassembled, was both an emotional and a scientific one, based on the physical reconstruction of scenes innately imbued with nostalgia and the understanding that, scientifically, memories are not static but are “recreated and reassembled each time they are conjured in the human brain.”
Pretend Grown Ups © Richard Tuschman/Courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York
This exhibition is a poignant expression of the universally nuanced emotions bound up in our personal reflections on our individual childhoods, at times unsettling, but always thought-provoking. “My hope and my aim has been to create a picture that expresses both the joy and pathos of childhood, as reflected in the fluctuating and ever-changing mirror of my memory."
