Biography

Torreya Cummings works with ideas of history and place to unlearn and subvert dominant narratives of the American west. Working across sculpture, installation, photography, performance and video, Cummings uses drag aesthetics, substitutions, hardware store materials, theater tricks, props, sets, dioramas, and the language of interpretive sites as tools to think about how we understand (or misunderstand) people and places through the media we consume. Their work is often project-based and site-related, influenced by research and an ambivalence towards the genre of landscape painting. Their recent work considers the question “what is queer landscape?”

They were a Bay Area Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and have exhibited solo projects at institutions including Recology SF, the Oakland Museum of California, Aggregate Space Gallery (Oakland), and Interface Gallery (Oakland), and group shows at The Contemporary Jewish Museum (SF), Root Division (SF), Gallery 16 (SF), and Bay Area Now. They have presented performances with Machine Project, Southern Exposure, and the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts. Cummings studied ceramics and photography at UC Davis and received an MFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts. They live and work in Oakland, CA.