Andrea Modica
Andrea Modica was born in Brooklyn in 1960 and holds a BFA from State University of New York College at Purchase and an MFA from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, LIFE, and Newsweek, among others. She is perhaps best know for her monograph Treadwell, which follows the struggles of a young girl Barbara and her large family in the rural town of Treadwell, New York, from 1986 to 1995. Modica’s interest is in the relationships between and psychology of her subjects, and to that end many of her photographs in Treadwell are staged. Modica’s works are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of Art, among others. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994 and currently is an associate professor of photography at Drexel University. Modica also teaches at the International Center of Photography.
As We Wait (February 1-24, 2018)
Essay by Larry Fink about Modica’s Artworks:
Andrea Modica works with sensual love as her base but aligned with a darkness which is pervasive, so much so that it can color your dreams. The work is not hopeless but breathless, as if there is an atmospheric gauze placed over the larynx so that breathing has to be softened, done in silence so that walking the tight rope between an exalted life and a sultry death you shan’t emit too loud a sound. The balance is so tentative, so tactile, so absolutely fragile that there is the danger of tipping the scales of mortality in clear sight.
We enter the work through an illusionary visage of two men sitting on the edge of a steaming tub. A rectangular pool, one is naked the other in a sports coat. One is looking haltingly into the future the other waiting ominously within the present. They set the scenario for the dark theater which is to come; a vascular pulse generates throughout the work, which sure-footedly explores the aspects of life which have no surety at all. It is perhaps this soft pulse which separates this work from art. So many of the compositions are artful and exquisitely divined, but art is not the point here. Art, in its tendency for commoditized promiscuity, will not dwell easily on the edge of heat and possible demise. Nothing is disappearing here; it is in your face but without being frontal, it lays back and allows you to be seduced by meanings which are not to be understood.
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