Tore Terrasi

Tore Terrasi is an intermedia artist and designer residing in the Metro-Boston area. He is currently an Associate Professor of Studio Foundation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.


Typography
Lines
Archival Forms
Timescapes





toreterrasi@gmail.com

Typography

The constant interplay between words and images has yielded especially fertile ground for Terrasi's research and serves as the common thread connecting all his creative activity. His ambitions as a communicator are to reconsider the conventions through which we experience texts and images by way of exploring the simultaneously independent and interdependent nature of their relationship.

His work is conceptually rooted by the phrase ‘visual language’ and technically rooted by some mechanism of time-based media. Through this word, image, temporal interplay his work facilitates a synthesis between a verbal and visual experience. At this intersection, the material concerns of the physical world and the computational processes of digital media work in concert.  

Lines

“A line is a dot that went for a walk.” - Paul Klee

The Lines series uses the simple visual metaphor of a meandering mark to represent the complex notion of a life’s journey. Each compositional element is composed of a single non-overlapping line. Between each end point is a series of curves and bends creating a densely and meandered form. On the rare instances in which visual elements intersect each patterns start to emerge creating a visual complexity greater than the sum of its parts. The simplicity and abstraction of these forms lend themselves to an open interpretation. The compositions demand full attention and focus. Though the labyrinths can be scanned over and taken in as a whole it is only through the disciplined and time consuming journey from end point to end point in which the art is fully experienced.

The series spans drawing, printmaking, digital, laser-engraving, typography, and performance.

Archival Forms

In many regards Grid Studies examines an outdated visual system of organizing and cataloging information while suggesting the abundance of knowledge available today. In other regards the work explores the nature or essence of grids, regardless of the information it contains. Since the text on the outdated media is too small for the audience to read, other characteristics come forward; the patterns, the organization of space, the light and dark areas overlapping each other. The work is playful in that the audience knows there are words, but understand they are not meant for a traditional reading in this context. The construction of work is also playful. We ‘weave’ our words. In some of these works the term is taken literally as long pieces of microfilm are woven in and out of each other creating a micro-chip like image. In addition to technological evolution the work can’t help but also allude to agriculture, architecture, and language.

Working with old media, through weaving or layering, re-activates the once discarded, transforming one form of information into another. 

Timescapes

If we define a panorama as an image that allows us to see more of an image - a more complete survey of a subject- allowing for an uninterrupted view, how might we define a temporal panorama? A temporal panorama would suggest the ability to document the cause and the effect - the before with the after. Or at the very least, a temporal panorama allows us the opportunity to see more than a single moment in time or a single location in space, all the while affording us the luxury of viewing a single image.

In the second series Terrasi combines elements from previously created artworks. The aesthetic similarities of the subway photographs and the strips of microfilm (from the series Grid Studies within Archival Forms) is striking in this series of mashups. The rigidity of the page layouts and historical archive rubbing up against the rigidity of modern city life and urban planning systems creates a very dynamic visual and conceptual dialogue within the series.