Headlands Center for the Arts

Torreya Cummings is a project-based visual artist working with ideas of space, place, and time, particularly around unlearning dominant narratives of the American west. Cummings works in a range of media—from photography and sculpture to installation, performance, and video—using drag aesthetics, poor substitutions, reflections, hardware store materials, theater tricks, and the language of interpretive sites. Projects usually begin with a site or event, and incorporate historical or experiential research. Their current focus is queer landscape.

Cummings has exhibited solo projects at the Oakland Museum of California, Aggregate Space Gallery, and more, and has presented performances with Machine Project, Southern Exposure, and the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, among others. Cummings received an MFA from California College of the Arts and is based in Emeryville, CA.

Selected Video Work

Bull (Trailer), 2011. (Duration 05:19)

Destry Rides Again, Again, 2012. (Duration 5:38). Video documentation courtesy of Machine Project.

Research Trip, 2019. Video (7:25).

Selected Documents

Arrested Decay Interpretive Site Walking Tour, 2019-2021. Writing sample. This text accompanied an installation project that consisted of a tightly framed view into a diorama of an outhouse in the ghost town of Bodie, CA. This “walking tour” is a riff on the official walking tour of Bodie, which is indirectly referenced in “Notes from ‘Camp'”.