eeming at Soo Visual Art Center was Torey’s first solo exhibition. Seeming brings together a suite of sculpture, photography, and film portraying contemplations of mortality, the theater of reality, ritual, and temporality.
Torey examines the poetic nature of the physical world with an installation of “ash capsules” or stone urns with bronze cone shaped caps. The urns were drawn from her late grandmother’s ash burial in a curling rock. They are associated with humility, impermanence. “The birds will not even eat us, we are so full of toxins.”
These sculptures, along with photographs of raw silk point to the natural phenomenon of metamorphosis. She creates her own simple imposition of transforming a tree into paper, printing the geolocation of the tree onto the paper, encouraging people to transport themselves to the tree. In the gallery wall there is a peephole with films projected on the inside of the wall for the viewer to see - a window into a dream. A poem scrolls on the monitor in the gallery:
the possibility
that we could die young
was very real
I held a handful of smoke
our sense of separation
fell
away
into a dry world of enormous fluid
body
I spoke to the color yellow and its twin
they began
to breath (two breath)
we will be here for 9 seconds
and I brushedthedeadout of my h air, taking candid
pleasure in sharing the twins illusion
who will tell you
when you are on the wrong
latitude?
Spiraling out
of time
I forgot
all that I have ever written
The notion of objects, subjects, and things ‘becoming’ rather than being, is a major theme throughout the work. The world is breath and all that exists in it is form, closely bound to the structure of the crust.