My name is Andy Todd and I graduated from Paier College of Art with a BFA in photography in 2008. I now teach at various schools and workshops and am pursuing my fine art career. I have participated in group exhibitions around the state from New Haven, to Torrington and Hartford. I embrace both traditional and digital means of creating images and use both in my work. My father was an aerospace engineer and my mother, a math teacher, so needless to say I was brought up in a scientific household. I am constantly striving to blend the two, often opposing disciplines of art and science. Photography has been the perfect bridge from the left to right side of my brain. Im inspired by photographers of the past and present including Josef Sudek, Edward Steichen, Joel-Peter Witkin, and Sally Mann. My teachers and students are, however, my day to day inspiration and I am extremely grateful for all they have done.
Project Statement
Andrew Todd
85 Colony Ave.
Trumbull, CT 06611
203-520-0930
Pieces of a Whole:
Images from an Untold Story
The goal of this project is to embrace rather than work around the natural
ambiguity of photography. This project is about constructing reality rather than attempting to reveal it. Each image is a photographically accurate portrayal of the fictional and imagined. More importantly, the images are open ended. They thrive on the fact that there is more than one interpretation; in fact that is much of their meaning. They give a surrealistic framework, begging to have the details filled in, characters added, and sequence arranged. The images along with their titles construct a bizarre world, which may or may not exist in reality, but
flourishes in the minds of their viewers. The world created is not governed by the laws of physics as ours is, rather it is governed by the laws of imagination. Like viewing stills from a movie ones never seen, each viewer creates his or her own story based on a foundation of imagery supplied by the artist. Ultimately, any
experience is all the more powerful when one is able to find his/her own route, rather than being told where to go.
Still Life:
Objects and Ideas
There is a certain gap that exists between art and science. One claims to be driven primarily by analysis and logic, the other by feeling and emotion. They even claim different territories in the brain. However, there are many things that art and science in fact share. Furthermore, both disciplines could benefit from bridging the gulf between the two. It could be argued that it takes the creativity of an artist to make a great scientist and the discipline of a scientist to make a great artist. There is a fundamental similarity between science and art in the use of representation and symbol to express complex ideas. Simply because the
symbols used are not necessarily the same, the idea of a symbol carries through both. Still Life: Objects and Ideas explores the idea of using objects as symbols, alone and in conjunction with one another, to express complex ideas. They are arranged both to be aesthetically pleasing, and serve as a representation of an idea, many of which are ideas from the scientific worlds of physics and biology. After all, when the root of both art and science is exposed both practices are
attempting to provide answers to many of the same questions.
Cold Hands/Warm Heart:
Images After Death
A human life can mean more than being alive in the biological sense. Respiration, digestion, circulation, reproduction, brain activity; these are the processes that enable a human life, but do not necessarily define it. A human life is a complex web built over its duration and consists of an intricate interplay between individual and individual, individual and group, individual and environment, etc. The external constructs, both concrete and abstract, that are built over a lifetime define a human life as much, if not more than, the internal systems that run it.
When biological death occurs, meaning the processes enabling life cease to work, there is still a life that remains. This life has nothing to do with notions of an afterlife or spiritual energy somehow connected to the deceased remaining active. The life that is left is the remnants of what the individual built while his or her biological innards were still functioning. This life obviously varies from individual to individual, and in some cases consists of not much more than a body. In most however, what is left is both tangible - a house, belongings, clothes, photographs, descendants - and abstract - relationships, connections, feelings, memories, ideas.
How long does it take before this residue of life fades into history, and the individual responsible for it to become a mere dot on a family tree, all traces of the person gone? Clearly it is dependent on what type of life the individual in question built for himself. In special cases, for example Isaac Newton and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, their life continues for centuries, being reconstituted anytime someone plots the orbit of the earth or is moved by Symphony #40. For most, it may only be a few generations before they disappear entirely.
When Mary Wargo, my grandmother, died in February of 2010, the life that she left resided in the house she lived in for 60 years. In the weeks following her death, my family had the arduous and somewhat surreal experience of literally dismantling her life. In this collection of photographs are images of my grandmothers life just as she had left it, as well as images of the process of taking it apart. These images serve to document the physical, tangible life that she left.
The audio portion of this project is a soundtrack meant to accompany the images. The track is made up of pieces of conversations between my grandmother and me that were recorded in 2006 and 2007. It is transient, ethereal and fleeting, made to mimic the intangible life left by Mary Wargo, the relationship formed between a young boy and an old woman.
The last time I saw my grandmother was in the hospital. She was frail, sunken in, weak. I sat by her bedside and she smiled and took my hand. I apologized. I had been outside and my hands were frigid. "Cold hands, warm heart", she had said. Those were the last words she spoke to me.
