“The light has changed everything for me.
As I near my second month here, as selfish as it may sound coming from someone who hasn’t experienced an Estonian winter, I have the aching desire to stay until the light dies. I wish for once I could make decisions based on a season; not in a hippie, I’m-following-the-moon sort of way… I suppose I am following the sun. And the daylight is powerful. It’s changing my sleep; my moods; my day; my thoughts, and it’s good. It’s alive. Bright like the future, like an extra season, or an extra day; with a golden hour multiplied by four, perfectly suspended in an ochre hue. I wish I could ride this out until it’s time to go back inside, huddle in, and prepare for the winter, and when that change happens, I would leave. But I only have a month left in Estonia, and I’m frantically trying to capture it all. To see as many sunrises and sunsets as humanly possible.
Time and light have been on my mind. My ideas have been organically morphing into something tangible (while the subject is the intangible), a true synthesis of many past and present thoughts. And as I focus on the perceptual experience of light within my work, time becomes a true enemy. I wish I had more of it. After two months, I’ve found my footing, I feel like I live here, and the possibilities seem endless. Though I will not be able to finish all of my projects here, this residency has provided so much inspiration and new ways of looking at the world. All of this will impact my work for a very long time to come. With each new day, my lived experience becomes the forefront of my work; and is there anything more an artist could ask for than to see ideas and life become an embodied experience? For me that is the ultimate goal as an artist.”
Montana Torrey has by now finished her residency. Her final exhibition “Westward Light Expansion” was up for one week in the abandoned part of the Aparaaditehas factory, and attracted a lot of interest. A few impressions:
