5 minute read
IN STUDIO WITH TORRIE GROENING
BY PEPPA MARTIN
Peppa Martin’s visit to Torrie Groening’s Vancouver studio reveals the ethos of an avid collector and artist; high intention, high production, and an elegant manifestation of a good idea.
TORRIE GROENING’S STUDIO was built in 1910 by architect Frederick Mellish, and originally housed the Norwegian Lutheran Church. Mellish was a well-known architect from Ontario who moved to Vancouver in 1908 and went on to build a number of homes, churches, and warehouses. Subsequently occupied by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Cry in the Wilderness Church, and lastly, the Basel Hakka Lutheran Church, the building was decommissioned as a church in 2008 and became a private residence. Torrie’s family’s ongoing work on the building has included a new set of altar windows that echo the Gothic archway of the interior stage and exterior brickwork sourced from local neighbourhood tear-downs.
I met Torrie at her studio on a postcard-worthy day, saturated in sunshine. I rang the buzzer at the tall wooden gate and was swiftly greeted by the artist along with her sociable pug, Stella. Warm, engaging, and with pale rose-pink hair reminiscent of vintage chintz, Torrie toured me around the studio, pausing at projects in various states of progress.
At 1700 square feet, the studio sprawls under an uncommonly high ceiling and is encircled with tall, broad windows that drench the room with natural light. Worktables are oriented around the room. An array of paints, pastels, coloured pencils, pigments, and brushes occupy drawers and containers. Tripods with lights and a medium format camera gather around the constructed set of a developing photo series. Cubbies overflow with small ornamental glass vessels in a kaleidoscopic rainbow of colours.
A giant inkjet printer looms large in one corner, easy chairs surrounded by shelves of art books create a lounge area under a massive monitor, and surfaces are strewn with test prints.
One quickly discovers Torrie’s métier: collections. “I started collecting bits of nature when I was a kid — rocks and things on the beach,” she says. Torrie now photographs her found and collected objects and, by employing a process of cut and paste, creates large-scale collage artworks. “The creative part is building the sets, researching, finding objects, composing, and assembling,” she muses. “I work on the still life images like stage sets: the objects, the actors, and myself, the director.
Objects are chosen for their evocative sense and may take on new understanding when linked by proximity to another. These new works include objects from nature and from those shelves where we stow the things that are not treasures, but objects kept for their particular allure. With the collection and arrangement of the still life scene, I create unlikely, but not impossible situations. In this fluid state, the collages are added to and economized until the composition is established. Several objects have recurring roles in new works, often transformed for their new setting.”
Seated in the lounge/library, we enter into a wide-ranging discussion on the local arts community, our mutual acquaintances, artist’s biography books (Josef Sudek, Georgia O’Keeffe), her upcoming book-making workshop in Italy, and her creative ethos (namely, “high intention, high production, and an elegant manifestation of a good idea”).
After two decades of working in traditional printmaking and collage in Vancouver, Victoria, and Toronto, Torrie shifted towards a hybrid practice of digital photography and collage, after she moved to San Francisco in 2001. “It was an exciting time to be in California with new digital technology in photography and printing. Artists were beginning to create mixed media works that embraced this creative freedom and technology. I saw artists Deborah Orapollo and William Wiley using digital photography adventurously, like artists do…and I was heartened that the museum community began accepting these works. As well as home to many of Adobe’s top Photoshop masters and instructors, San Francisco had the benefit for me of an enthusiastic art community.” It was a life-changing experience that catapulted her into a new phase of artistic practice, after many years of working as a stone lithographer.
Torrie’s successes include an exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts, and participation in Houston’s Fotofest 2018 with a solo show at Foto Relevance Gallery. She also completed two public commissions that were featured in Vancouver’s Capture Photography Festival in 2018.
The first Capture Festival project was a commission from the philanthropic Leong family to provide a public art installation at the new Segal Family Health Centre at Vancouver General Hospital. Occupying five stories, Colour Seekers, The Colour Collector’s Way is printed on transparent vinyl affixed to the windows of each floor, making it visible from both the street to passersby, and inside to patients of the facility.
Colour Seeker, The Colour Collector’s Way, installed at Vancouver General Hospital. Patients and staff experience the images as colour that fills the corridor during the day, while the images appear in a glowing lightbox to the public from the outside at night.
The second Capture Festival project in partnership with the Gastown Business Improvement Association took place in what she describes as “the most charming alley in Vancouver.” Torrie’s photo-collage work in this unusual venue featured a piece called Alley View Bouquet, a Delivery for Mrs. Deighton, curated by Kate Henderson, celebrating an unsung heroine of local history. Mrs. Deighton was Qwa-halia (Madeline) Deighton, a Squamish woman who married John “Gassy Jack” Deighton (for whom Gastown was named) at 12-years old — 30 years his junior. The Deighton family ran a hotel, which caught fire and burned down in the Great Fire of Vancouver in 1886. On the night of the fire, women from the Squamish Nation paddled back and forth between their home on the North Shore and what is now Gastown, in canoes to rescue people. Torrie’s piece aims to pay tribute and shed light on the lesser-known women of this local history.
“Destiny Bouquet” Photomontage, 2016.
Alley View Bouquet, A Delivery for Mrs. Deighton. A Vancouver public art project, 2018.
Currently, Torrie is tackling a new approach of merging her photography with 3D sculpture.
While no longer a house of worship, this photographer’s studio is doubtlessly divine.
Torrie with her work Colour Seeker, The Colour Collector’s Way a mural commission installed over five floors at Vancouver General Hospital.
torriegroening.com
