STATEMENTS
TYCHS, 2014 - PRESENT
Tychs began with a portrait of the baby blue cottage in upstate New York that the married artists lived in together in 2007, before embarking on a significant journey where they created the esteemed series Hurry Up & Wait. The pentaptych piece created from this portrait, titled Atwood Road became the impetus behind the artists search to find what they call “home.” Their interests range across three specific areas: the everyday, the home, and the archive. They believe that the home is a living memoir and the voyeur in all of us wants to peer inside others lives to help understand our own.
For the past year, the couple has been subletting apartments mostly through the commonly used online platform Airbnb. During this time they have lived in many apartments and differing neighborhoods such as Bed-Stuy, Clinton Hill, South Slope and the Upper West Side. In doing so, they step into the domestic lives of others, temporarily assuming their daily rituals, surrounded by their objects, both precious and utilitarian. In their work, the artists focus on the details that could possibly tell the story of a person’s life, while also addressing the anonymity of such constructions. The significance of personal objects is transferred onto them by their owners, and now onto the viewer as objects and photographic archives.
In Tychs, their interest lies in formal elements and how one normally approaches a photograph. The images range from nuanced shifts in dimension created by printing inside the edges of the frame taking on the subtlety of sculpture, to several polyptychs with fading color that visually mimics the fading of memory and time.
LOST ONES, 2012
Lost Ones is a photographic series produced by the duo Tribble & Mancenido edited from six years of collaborative work. In the time between returning from a year-long road trip, which resulted in their celebrated series Hurry Up & Wait, and beginning their joint graduate studies, Tribble & Mancenido underwent the task of re-examining hundreds of negatives. The initial impulse was simply to reevaluate – see with fresh eyes – but what began as curiosity soon turned into a body of work. Small, focused segments were cropped from the negatives. Once enlarged subtle grain, noise and texture is exposed. They realized that some of the smallest details captured in a scene -a tissue box, clock face and wall plug- were truly engaging in their own quiet and often semi-abstract way.
HURRY UP AND WAIT, 2008 -2009
At the height of one of the worst financial crises in American history, photographers James Frank Tribble and Tracey Mancenido-Tribble went to truck-driving school, got their commercial driver’s licenses and hit the highway. With the long tradition of road photography, ever present in mind, Tribble & Mancenido set out on their own journey across America to explore and illuminate the trucking subculture that drives our economy. Spending one full year on the road, the couple drove their 18-wheeler over one hundred thousand miles and spent over two thousand hours delivering loads.
Hurry Up & Wait is a personal, reverential and poetic meditation of an industry, and way of life, that most people know very little about. In their beautifully composed and staged portraits, Tribble and Mancenido make use of the misty atmosphere and white gravel ground of common truck stops as a backdrop against which they evoke the surprisingly tender nobility of their fellow truckers. And their tightly focused studies of the places and paraphernalia integral to trucking life such as gas stations, parking lots, warning triangles and empty trailers elevates these prosaic subjects to a level of distinction.
Instead of entertaining stereotypical notions about truck drivers, Tribble & Mancenido show us the quiet, and oft-times, majestic, moments of a driver’s life and, specifically, what that life looked like to them through the lens of their large format camera.