Torreya Cummings

Instagram: @torreya.c

Website: http://www.torreya.info

Bio: Torreya Cummings works with sculpture, installation, photography, performance and video to explore how we understand (or misunderstand) history, people and places. They were an inaugural Bay Area Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2021-2023), a Creative Work Fund grant recipient (2024), an Artadia SF finalist (2024), and have exhibited solo projects at institutions including Recology SF, the Oakland Museum of California, and Aggregate Space Gallery (Oakland); group shows at The Contemporary Jewish Museum (SF), Gallery 16 (SF) and the Museum of Art and History (Lancaster, CA). They have presented performances with Machine Project (LA), Southern Exposure (SF), and the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (SF). Cummings studied ceramics at University of California, Davis and holds an MFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts. Their studio is in Oakland, CA.

Statement: In this work, materials were scavenged from the waste stream at the San Francisco Dump during a four month residency. The palm trees forming the center of this piece came from an office building being emptied. Some of the mirrors, lamps and fake plants came from real estate staging companies clearing stock, other items are household cast offs: souvenirs, toys, decor. Representations of “paradise” or “the tropics” are often entwined with the impossible desire for escape (from the cold, the office, the grind) and separated from real, specific locations. The plants and animals are plastic, but the seashells were extracted from tropical places and were once alive. Sorting through these cast off representations was an opportunity to use commonplace and absurd materials to underscore a longing for paradise and the darker histories that underlie those desires. As in the baroque Italian paintings of the same title, which means “Even in Paradise, there am I”, the (plastic) skeleton serves as a reminder of Death, in this case hinting at the history of militarism, colonialism, resource extraction, and the tourism industry that make these escapist fantasies possible. The Bay Area, while cold and foggy and far away from the places that inspire these materials, is still linked to them by the Pacific Ocean, whose garbage patches are full of mass produced plastic items similar to those that are deposited at the transfer station hourly.