Some art stuff

I just felt like a posting a little bit of my work. One of the last classes that you take in art is one that is designed to help you get a job. Pretty much what we had to do was learn how to write an art resume and an artist statement (which I LOATHE!). The class is combined with all the graduating art students from photo, painting/drawing, ceramics/sculpture, and printmaking. At the end of the semester we did a big exhibition that showcased our work. I put 4 pieces in the exhibit. It was a really good learning experience. I also had to put together a solo show for one of my photo classes. It was kind of the same idea, just to help you get a portfolio put together to send out. Putting the show together was incredibly stressful, difficult, and expensive, but the final product was very rewarding. It felt really cool to display my work, and I had a lot of family and friends that came to support me at the reception... thanks guys!
Anyway, here is a little bit of what I turned in for the BFA class (the first one I talked about):

This image is from a body of work that I did in my very first Independent Projects class. We could shoot whatever we wanted throughout the semester, and the only requirement was that we use a holga camera. I've explained holgas a little bit before, but basically its just a cheap, plastic camera that has no shutter speed or aperture settings. I has a shutter release button, and that's really it! Its pretty funny because this body of work is probably my most favorite. Whats funny about it is, they're from what was basically my second photo class (in college). I had a hard time deciding what to photograph and ended up just doing things that involved metal. There were 15 photos in the series. I really REALLY enjoy working with film, and plastic/toy cameras. I've also said this before, but I just like the surprise of it all and the lack of control that you have. It makes things much less stressful, which if you know me at all, you know that's basically my life motto :) This image was accepted into the undergraduate show last fall.

I know this is very tiny on here, but this is the body of work that I did for my solo exhibition. There are 7 that I hung up for my show, but the whole series has 9 pieces. These images are a whole role of 120 film as a single image. They were shot with a pinhole camera that I made, developed, cut into sections, scanned, and printed digitally. I used a speed light to flash the light onto sections of the hand that I wanted exposed onto the film. I would advance the film in whichever way I wanted, and expose the parts that I felt like I wanted to, to create whatever kind of aesthetic I was going for. If you have questions about this at all, feel free to ask! I know its hard to understand, haha. Anyway, the prints ended up being about 7ft long and 10 inches high. Yeah, the glass for them was expensive. This is my favorite image from this body of work... sorry you can't see it very well.

This image was for a replication assignment. When I was learning studio lighting, we had to find an image that we liked and try to replicate it. Hence the name "replication assignment" ha. We had to shoot them using a 4x5 camera, which is very challenging for me because when you set it up, the image projects onto the glass upside down and backwards, so it's hard to position it in the right place. Unless you're dyslexic. And that's really not a joke, haha. BUT, I was very pleased to hear from my teacher that he liked this image way better than the original one. This kind of sparked him into telling me every day that I needed to move to Chicago to break into the commercial industry. Which is a huge compliment!!!

Lovely Bog :) This is one of my first digital assignments. Becca and the rest of my girls were way nice to always volunteer to be my models! I owe you girls big time! Becca also helped me with a body of work that I did for a final one semester by doing all the girls' hair! She's such a sweetie!

This is just a black and white film image from my photo 2 class. It's a pretty challenging class where you learn a lot of the technical aspects of film (the zone system, reciprocity failure, bellows extension, etc). The body of work is 15 images total. This particular image was taken at the old Indian Schools in Brigham City... SCARY!

This is from the pinhole work that I did for my studio final. I'm pretty sure I posted these already, so I wont say much more about them.

This is from the holga body of work that the first image was from. This one is the only one that didn't involve metal, haha. But it was a type of construction/constructed material, which is basically what the theme kind of was. I put this image in the BFA show.

These were for studio lighting. After this I got more pushes for Chicago from my teacher. Its funny because while I enjoy doing this kind of work, I much prefer other kinds. I guess we'll just see where the wind takes us!

This is a cyanodyke! Its an image putting two 19th century printing techniques together. The cyanotype is the blue, and the vandyke brown is obviously the brown. They're beautiful on their own, but its VERY fun to put them together and see what happens. A little bit of the unexpected that I love so much, haha. Anyway, 19th century processes of making photographs involve mixtures of lots of different and not always safe chemicals which are coated onto a surface of paper. You then would take a negative (they used to use glass negatives) put it on top of the paper, and the sun shines through it and exposes the image onto the paper. I had a whole class on these different processes and it was one of my favorites. If only I were brave enough to make the chemistry!

Another image from the solo show.

This image was shot with a 4x5 camera on some old litho-film that the school had. You can see how old the film is by all the lines that didn't expose or develop properly. But I really liked the image, and I like litho-film because its cheap and contrasty. With a 4x5 camera you can fix any perspective. It's pretty amazing really. So even though this section of the building was way higher than me, I could make it look like I was looking straight at it. You can only do that with medium and large format cameras and film. Which makes me smile :) Cause I like film.

Another pinhole series image that I've posted before.

More from the holga series.

Pinhole series.

This was from the first studio assignment. We had to photograph utensils using natural light. Then further down the semester we had to use the same utensils in a studio setting (one example is the 3 forks I showed earlier). A lot of my work evolved from this assignment. I really liked how this one turned out.

Another from the show. Thanks to my sweet husband for being my model so many times.

This is one of my first pinhole images. It doesn't belong to a particular body of work. This was also an image that inspired a lot of my later work, including what I ended up doing for my solo show. This image was in the undergrad exhibit this year, which is a juror-ed show (not so sure how to spell that, haha).

This is not intestines, or anything gross. It was from my color class. Its an image of clouds (shot with film) that is exposed onto the paper through glass that was covered in hand sanitizer. The color was manipulated in the enlarger. It was for a darkroom manipulation assignment. This was also in my BFA show, and when I went up to clean my glass one day, I caught a kid taking a picture of it with his phone! I took that as a pretty good compliment :)

This is one of my favorites from the holga series. It was also in the BFA show.

The rest of this work was for my portfolio class final. We had to do a fine art and a commercial body of work. For the fine art I just handed in what I did for my solo show. The following is for the commercial side. I also turned this in for another class that was taught by the teacher that is pushing for me to go the commercial route. He helped me out a lot, and it felt really good to be getting praise from him. He was a commercial photographer for a long time, and made a lot of money doing it. If you've ever eaten cheez-its or mcdonalds, or bought thomas the train toys, you've seen his work. Its pretty insane once you think about what HUGE clients those are. Not the kind of work I would be wanting to do, but still very cool.

I've been stressing out a lot lately because I'm afraid of losing my talent, and afraid that I'll forget a lot of what I've learned. There is NO market in Logan for anything but wedding photography (which I refuse to do), and we'll for sure be here for a few more years. I've got a really good job right now, that I really like and its hard to argue when Brig is still in school and I now have to be the sugar mama ;) So I guess we'll see what happens. Now that i'm not in school anymore, I don't have access to a lot of the things that I would need to make work. And while I want to spend money on those things, I also want for us to be able to buy a house and have a comfortable, normal life. I don't think I want to be in the commercial industry because of the stressful hours and environment, but at the same time, you can't help but think what it would be like to become some totally awesome, well known photographer! Its an industry that you can't go big in unless you move to a big city and work as an assistant for a few years. With kids, I wont be able to do that, and obviously wouldn't choose that life over having a family anyway. At the same time, I don't want my degree to go to waste. The plan for now is to just take a much needed break from it, and make work on my own when I can, that I will submit to shows (which is really what I want to do anyway). I guess wish me luck, haha!