TIM RODA’S SILENT MOVIES
Whether Tim Roda’s art could be construed as photography, theater, installation, sculpture, film, or even poetry, he is first and foremost a storyteller. The antecedents of these stories are personal memories covered by the patina of “old” Europe, universally expressed through his family. Tim echoes the maxim that photography is “time fixed on paper,” but he is specifically interested in the business of printing the legend, casting himself as Caravaggio on the lam or Lao Tzu improvising the heavens on a horse’s derriere at the city gates. There is a primal urgency to his tall tales, like a family secret brimming at the edge of a child’s lips, and he cleverly utilizes his son, Ethan, to convey it. His wife, Allison, dons the mask of sympathetic mediator, the stand-in for Demeter and Hestia (with a nod to Artemis) who blunts the severity of each sacred rite by keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings.
As my father once observed about his own rite of passage, “affection between men has always been circumscribed by pain…here, in the balance between love and brutality, lies the origin of sport, the first act of civilization.” Tim does not sentimentalize this tension or reduce it to the stoic father who only expresses his love obliquely through sweet teachings. Instead, he reveals the primitive conflict in all of us through his unique chiaruscuro scrims, which morph between portraits of the noble savage and the domestic captive. It’s fair to say he errs on the side of the cave-dweller or shaman where he and his son are concerned; however, civilization interposes the moment Allison enters the scene. Ethan’s complex role is that of the cipher, the helpmeet, and trickster: he is a mirror of the father’s romance, the one who must bear witness; he is a squire attending his father as he antagonizes threshold guardians; and most importantly, he is a playful reminder that these reenactments are ultimately more about spending time together than limning the contours of his father’s past and present.
Like his forbears, Tim is the salt of the earth, accustomed to hard work and getting his hands dirty. He’s also proud to let his craftsmanship speak for itself, rather than construct elaborate orthodoxies to justify (or codify) his intuition for the sake of less fearless folk. There is a casual bluntness to his aesthetic, a rustic paean to ancestor worship (where the initiate gives fealty to disembodied spirits, even as they are simultaneously exorcised). It’s a discomfiting language, one spoken with his malleable body, not unlike Buster Keaton trapped in Torquemada’s lair. His pratfalls are dangerous but deliberate, which means he is less a victim than the embodiment of a willful provocateur (with the transfigured spirit and regenerated body of Osiris/Prometheus/Dionysus/Christ/St. Bartholomew).
As if in a race against time, Tim builds these forbidding worlds and breaks them down in the same day, punctuating the ritual with a family dinner. His large-scale photographs are a testament to this process, like oversized movie stills, melding the unconscious intimacy of a home movie with the texture of a Goya etching. (sidebar: you must see these pictures live, at their true size…seeing them exclusively on the web or in magazines would be the equivalent of watching “Lawrence of Arabia” on an iPod). Tim channels the magic realism and duende of a gypsy troubadour, with one foot planted firmly in Freudian soil, the other wildly kicking up the detritus of the Jungian spirit world (which manifests in his unblemished printing method, replete with rough borders, developer stains, and mottled artifacts).
A gulf between father and son is mediated by the mother, in the role of Demeter. The son rehearses Persephone’s future plea in the burning mirror, illumined by his mother’s rightward gaze, his features blanched by a secret knowledge. The father encroaches on the left in the guise of a director, reminding them of the bargain: the son must bear witness, the wife, abide.
The holy family keeps its own counsel. A tacit agreement predetermines their story: the father as Hades lurks off stage, whispering his child’s lines. In turn, Ethan’s spirit leaps to him, far from the mother’s succoring heart (the understudy now donning his father’s mask).
A tilted mirror has maintained the family myth. The son, like Isaac in repose (occluded by his father’s gleaming blade), reproves the absent mother for his fate. A silver mask bisects the pensive child, his father’s countenance angling to meet him, the surface neither fractured nor annealed.
The play is from antiquity: Cronus enthralled, Uranus unaware of the future irony. The understudy sharpens his focus, the master contrives a future resurrection.
Ganymede bears a reliquary before the angry host: the ghost limb of Osiris, once consigned to water, now nourishes the lamb (even as the shepherd reproaches them, the Virgin Mary in abeyance).
Dionysus reclines for the winter, his body withering on the vine.
