(Ex)change: Tori Purcell - 2011 NARS Juried Solo Exhibition

The NARS Foundation is excited to announce the opening of its inaugural Juried Solo Exhibition (Ex)change: Tori Purcell. Tori Purcell is the winner of the 2011 NARS Juried Solo Exhibition Open Call and her work was selected by juror Nat Trotman, Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

In her photographs and installations Tori Purcell delves into the world of things, investigating how identity is formed and transformed through the everyday objects that populate our lives. Though based in specific contexts—the home of a Cuban immigrant or the small-town landscape of the southeastern United States—her documentary images allude to more general patterns of social and economic exchange. Ever conscious of the inextricable bonds between local and global, Purcell offers cool and composed commentary on the material culture of contemporary America. – Nat Trotman

Purcell’s work examines issues of migration, cultural displacement, and the socio-political constructs that form/transform identity and links them to a globalized economic system. In (Ex)change, her first solo exhibition in New York, Purcell will exhibit her sculptural installation Dialectic, a 50 feet long linked chain created using raw materials like sugar, coffee, corn, poppy seed, soy and petroleum oil that reference international trade from the African Diaspora while drawing comparison to the modern global economy. In her poetic and understated photographic series Neither Here, Purcell presents a poignant dialogue between a new adoptive environment and the home that was left behind by a Cuban immigrant. She quietly documents the complexities of maneuvering, merging, adapting and assimilating into a new cultural surrounding while referencing the larger context of international commerce.

Tori Purcell is a conceptual artist and photographer originally from Virginia. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Vanderbilt University, and a Masters of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is currently Acting Assistant Chair in the Photography Dept. at Pratt Institute and Adjunct Professor of Photography at Queensborough Community College. Tori Purcell lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.