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Portrait of a Family Snapshot

By Carrie E.A. Scott

The photograph is of a family. A child is in the corner and a man, presumably his father, rests at his wife's bedside. A cat sits on the bed cleaning itself. The scene is not unusual. It might be a cliché, a typically sad family portrait wherein something is going terribly wrong.

Untitled #60 © Tim Roda.
Image Courtesy of the Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle WA and
Gassser and Grunert Gallery New York, NY.

But despite this, despite the long tradition of demoralizing family portraiture in American Art, in this particular photograph the subtleties overpower the formulaic. The man's skin stretches hungrily across his back, exposing every rib and vertebra. The wife is lost, her body so small you can hardly see its shape under the bedcovers, her face so delicate it's hard to tell if her eyes are closed or open. And the child faces us, his audience, but his shaded expression is ambiguous like every other detail in the photograph, all dangling in front of us without fully exposing a straightforward narrative.

Such is the nature of Tim Roda's artwork. From his successful debut show at Greg Kucera Gallery in 2004, to the work now hanging in both Manhattan's Gasser & Grunert Gallery and again at Kucera until the 11th of February, Roda's been constructing portraits of his own family for several years.

In one shot you see Roda serving his son breakfast, in another he's dancing with his wife. Somewhat like Norman Rockwell's eerily still dinner tables or Diane Arbus' disconnected photographs of family life in the 1960s, these black and white prints are delicately hovering between total fabrication and heartbreaking honesty.

The scenes themselves are easy enough to describe, but the narrative that is strung across the work—which is both vividly playful and painfully dark—is not nearly as straightforward. The stories are blurred and seem set in another era. Some evoke the turn of the last century. Others are pregnant with symbols from the 1980s. In one shot, Roda's son plays with HeMan figures. In another, Roda uses some sort of an industrial-age machine.

That the era is ambiguous makes perfect sense; Roda uses his wife and son to reenact moments from a childhood he is still trying to make sense of.

Appropriately, details in the photographs are exaggerated as built from the memory of a child. Untitled #63, for example, shows Roda and son about to cut the grossly elongated neck of a fabricated goose. The image, lifted from memory, references Roda's interaction with his father at the slaughter. In the photographic re-enactement, the artist's long unfulfilled desire to assist comes across in the form of the son, who holds garden shears, at the ready to cut the animal's neck while his father performs the procedure alone. The son, like Roda was, is seemingly ignored.

In Untitled #78 Roda is bent over. His wife is holding a huge tube, dressed in sanitary gowns, and poised to violate him. Roda is the first to admit to this boyish memory of a time when worms were pervasive in his family. The routine examinations are embroidered here, the tube enormous, the son's face shocked as he watches.

While the photographs rework a personal history, the conditions of Roda's modern family also bleed into the images. Last year they lived in Helena, Montana while Roda did a residency at the Archie Bray Foundation. Though this famous ceramic center is located in one of the more progressive towns in Montana, the Roda's were somewhat ostracized once the artist's work was shown there. His son's isolation comes across in every image from that series. Though always photographed with at least one of his parents, the boy is repeatedly secluded from the action; no one ever touches him and his glance is usually away from the camera lens.

That Roda's images pivot back and forth between salient truths garnered from the memory of a child and the life his family is now living is testament to his fearless subject. Using a truly universal theme—the family—Roda captures a painful but poignant truth: We all spend a great deal our adult lives trying to make sense of what happened in our youth and, indeed, we use the families we make as adults to reprocess the things we went through as children. In short, Roda's work uses the family he has made to sort through the undigested moments of a family that made him.