MEET THE ARTISTS

Separate/together featured students

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HANNAH ALTMAN

Virginia commonwealth university - mfa

Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. I trace ache back to other aches - when my mother grabbed my wrist pulling me across the intersection, when my great-grandmother’s fingers went numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, when Miriam’s palms enduringly poured water for the Hebrews throughout their desert journey - this is how the Jew is able to fathom an ache. Because no physical space is a given for the Jewish diaspora, time and the rituals that steep into it are centered as a mode of carrying on. The bloodline of a folktale, an object, a ritual, pulses through interpretation and enactment. In this work I explore notions of Jewish memory, narrative heirlooms, and image making; the works position themselves in the past as memories, in the present as stories being told, and in the future as actions to interpret and repeat. To encounter an image in this way is not only to ask what it feels like, but to ask: what does it remember like?

MARILYN BOATWRIGHT

MASSACHUSETTS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN

bfa IN PHOTOGRAPHY

For the past five years I have left college in the northeast to return home to Florida twice a year, once in the winter and once in the summer, and the differences between where I now call home and where I used to call home grow deeper every visit. After we all left my childhood home when I went to college in 2015, my parents began a pattern of moving from apartment to apartment and job to job. The instability of being unable to end the patterns of drug addiction and mental illness that intensified when I was in high school, led me to leave home in the first place but, are recently becoming out of control. When I go back to Florida, I’m plunged back into the intense weather and overbearing sun. Old feelings I thought I escaped, begin to swallow me up again. My rapid growth from thriving in a supportive new environment becomes more abrasive to my parents who are spiraling downward. Their refusal to recognize there is a problem makes it harder to stay home and harder to leave them behind. Their behavior has cost them many relationships and even other family member and I can’t bear to let my parents be alone. Once in the winter and once in the summer, I begin a pilgrimage home and navigate through all this all over again.

Last year, I began to take pictures when I was home with my family for the first time. When I returned home to my new college, MassArt in Boston, with the pictures I’d taken and handfuls of images plucked from scrapbooks I began my current project. This current work They Get It Honest focuses on my relationship to my family after leaving for college and what it means to return home to a dysfunctional family after learning how to make it on your own. This work uses multiple photographic processes to express psychological space. When taken in as a whole the images make connections between memories, time, and how photography has always been a way to build my own personal space and identity.

BOOTZ

Metropolitan State University of Denver

BFA in Studio Art

There is an inherent performativity to photography. You are often asked to gather and pose in front of the camera. You smile and say 'cheese', but when you smile, it may not align with your experience of the event, or the emotions you feel at the time. There is a certain amount of posing and exhibiting false emotion that I did, and we all do, in front of the camera. This is not to say I was never happy, but since we are conditioned to pose in front of the camera, we are never presenting our authentic selves and photography becomes a site for false nostalgia.

The Weight of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting confronts trauma and trauma related memory loss through the lens of my childhood. I grew up with a bipolar, alcoholic father, who left me feeling anxiety ridden and depressed, but because I had experienced the trauma for most of my life I had no understanding that anything was wrong until I was in my 20s. Additionally, my parents divorced when I was four. These experiences gave me a lot to process at a young age when did not yet have the tools to do so, shaping much of my formative years. This led me to have out of control, undiagnosed anxiety through my teens and into my early 20s which made being present difficult.

Whilst reflecting on my childhood experience for this project, I decided to use materials that directly reflect the experience of my youth. The photographs are printed using the cyanotype process. This process produces the monochromatic cyan image, representing the memory loss I have experienced. I then use a printmaking process, known as screen monotype to obscure my face, a physical representation of, a of an intangible traumatic experience. The choice of the material and processes is calculated. The images at once spark a note of nostalgia and then an instantaneous sense of mourning, for the childhood taken away by the trauma I experienced. While I may have been performing in front of the camera for much of my life it is often all I have to look back on, the only memory I have.

PHOEBE CHRISTINA BURNS

UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA, TUSCALOOSA

Digital Art and Photography

My project, Mental Pictures, is a series based upon conveying the experience of being bipolar. This project is personal to my experience as someone living with a mental illness as well as others who live with this experience. Due to stigma and the media, mental illness is so grossly exaggerated that most people don’t know what mental illness looks like. I made photographs and a VR experience about having Bipolar disorder in response to how popular culture depicts people who have mental disorders. Mental illness is somewhat above visual. Its visual, sound, and feeling. Primarily feeling because bipolar is a behavioral disorder where people react out of emotion. The work is a series of photographs of people looking behind “fleshy” masks of themselves. These pictures were put into a virtual house that contains three rooms depicting mania, depression, and the in between. The pieces can be either appreciated in a physical space or on the computer or virtual reality headset. I put these pictures inside a house because home is a safe place for private thoughts. It is where the emotional turmoil is housed. But the turmoil isn’t as private as you think. Since it is a house, anyone can go into the house and see the fluctuation of emotions for themselves. But none will be able to leave. The portraits serve as the feelings within the house and shows their own personal turmoil. The portraits have two or more faces. But which face is real? Is it the masks or is it the person behind the masks? Or is it both?

JULIANNE CLARK

THE UNIVERSITY OF TULSA

MFA in Photography

In my studio practice, I tell stories about natural spaces and home through the lens of memory. I combine collected photographs, created images, videos, and objects into vignettes in order to bring forth narratives about generational family relationships in context with The Southern landscape. Using both the past and present, real and fabricated, I invoke comparisons between people and nature, life and decay, creation and destruction. I represent both shared and individual dreams and memories. I use the natural world, domesticity, and industrial landscapes as stages for incantation to call forth these memories and dreams. On a broad scale, my work asks the viewer to consider how degradation of the land relates to erosion of family and community.

Looking at the landscape, I specifically relate to my great-grandparents, who were both scientists and artists. I use semiotics of both art and science when creating, engaging with the taxonomic and the nostalgic, the systematic and the sentimental. A visual dialogue with wild, unkempt pieces of land versus paved, manicured, or industrial spaces in the urban and suburban landscape intrigues me - do we claim the land, or does it claim us? This interplay of schism and fusion between natural and unnatural symbolically represents the relationship between other generations and my own; we are both bonded and disconnected. In terms of presentation, I play with the visual language of archiving and natural history museum displays to blur the lines between truth and fiction, between the real and the unknowable. I investigate these symbolic and ideological ambiguities through the creation of a narrative pseudo-history. Through my work, I explore my relationship to a particular environment both logically and emotionally, as my great-grandparents felt linked through art and science more than fifty years ago.

AMANDA CORDELL

Henderson State University

BFA in Graphic Design

I discovered my passion for cinematic photography when I realized I couldn't fully express myself in any other style. What I wanted to express was very dark and personal, so I needed an outlet that gave me control over subject, lighting, and location. Using this style, I was able to provide insight into my traumas without showing exact details. I manipulated the photos to show what I felt and experienced without shooting exact reproductions of my past.

My goal with these photos was to not only capture an experience, but to make each scene detailed enough for people to be able to relate, but obscure enough so that anyone can attach a memory to it. I took many of these photos in an old abandoned house in Mt. Ida, Arkansas. The house was fully furnished from the 60's and 70's so I used each room as a stage.

My process is elaborate because I want to make sure I see every angle. First, I brainstorm for a few days while I scout for places and request models. Then, once the photoshoot day comes, I start it off with an interview of my models. I explain to them my concepts for my shoot my ideas for staging, and how I want the subjects to respond. I show them example photos and sketches that I have prepared as well. Once everyone is on the same page, the photoshoot begins.

KATELYN EDWARDS

Bradley University

BS in Studio Art with a concentration in Photography

Being Human: Life Through the Eyes of Artists is an examination of the artistic world. Using environmental portraiture and oral histories, this work explores the human condition as described by a diverse collection of creative individuals. Through layering of the individual’s likeness, creative production, and workspace, I capture their worldly experience in one image.

Spurred by my own experiences as an artist and my research on art and the human condition, this project highlights the way creators view the world. As a generally quiet, studious individual, I found a way to use my observations of the world to connect with others. Through these connections I developed a fascination with people’s histories and world views that led to the pursuit of the Being Human project.

In Being Human, I give a voice to the diversity of artistic backgrounds and practices. I ask my audience to embrace the diversity of the art world and to value all of its creators, not just those whose work hangs in a gallery or museum.

JESSE EGNER

PARSONS SCHOOL OF DESIGN

MFA IN PHOTOGRAPHY

This series explores queer disidentification - How LGBTQ+ individuals in different communities and social environments construct, engage in, and practice their own disidentities not bound by any existing structure. As a fat gay man with invisible disability. I have experienced countless rejection from members of my fellow gay community members. This project began as an exploration into my frustrations of feeling outcast from a community that is supposed to be welcoming and accepting, and developed info an exploration into the vast amount of queer identities and individuals who do not assimilate into any normativity. These queer disidentities exist in a state of dynamism, always with the potential of change but can also exist in a state of stability. To “queer” your identity is not to create a counter identity - Rather, it is to disidentify entirely and remove yourself from any existing framework. The uncanny and playful performative acts in these photographs represent the precarious nature of queer identity and the vast potential it has to form, transform, and reform. This series explores disidentification, self-representation, and the fluidity of becoming, as well as call attention to the struggles from which disidentification is manifested - The gaze, the oppression, the self-doubt, and the self-destruction.

ELIZABETH ELLENWOOD

University of Connecticut

MFA in Studio Art

Microplastics are a common headline in the news. Each week brings new reports on plastic particles in our oceans, rivers, snow and air, yet how do we as the general public begin to understand these teeny tiny pieces? To become invested in the minuscule pollutants, we need to physically see them. I have dedicated my studio practice to creating beautiful, yet haunting images, aimed at making the widespread marine debris issues visible. Beach walks act as anchor and inspiration, offering me space to question, think, and create. My work combines a reverence for the ocean with research-driven photography to encourage curiosity and environmental awareness.

For my Sand and Plastic Collection, I mimic the tools, materials, and labeling used in scientific labs for my own research focused on the tiny trash. My collection follows a protocol: see a small plastic fragment, scoop the sand and native particles along with the fragment into a petri dish, chart the latitude and longitude of the sample, and numerically label the sample. I use the repetitive circular shapes of the petri dishes to reference planets or more specifically, the moon—a controlling force behind the tides where plastics break apart.

Collaborating with researchers and scientists opened my eyes to the importance of classifying the unrecognizable plastics. Once the original material is identified, the information can help inform policies and new source manufacturing. My goal with my ongoing Sand and Plastic Collection is to create visually engaging imagery with scientific materials to give viewers an entry point into microplastics research. I want to offer my artwork and skills to be a part of the ocean conservation discussion, a part of the momentum for change in my lifetime.

GRAHAM FEE

University of Colorado, Boulder - BFA

“I make art because it allows me to be interested in everything.” -Dean Adams

Dean Adams, my then professor, had just nonchalantly sparked one of the most profound and notable realizations I would have in my art career up until this point. It was then in that tiny, dimmed classroom at Montana State University that I finally felt like I truly understood why it was that I chose to dedicate my studies, and ultimately my life, to making art.

My work is directly inspired by my everyday experiences, which are then filtered through the various subcultural lenses of graffiti, snowboarding, skateboarding, and hip hop. I was not only a part of all of these, but each has allowed me to discover myself as a person and ultimately as an artist.

Within my work I seek to portray the familiar in an unfamiliar way. This is done largely with these specific subcultural influences in mind; connecting and juxtaposing not only specific ideas, themes, and styles to one another, but also allowing my work to connect the viewer and myself through a sense of shared experience. I make work as a communicative process to speak directly with those who view it and in this, I allow my work to become the start to a conversation or spark of inspiration that the viewer can take with them.

While the methods change the madness remains largely the same. Through the use of color, flattened shape, theme, and motif my work is meant to be understood, even on the most visceral of levels. Ultimately, my work acts as a visually-communicative exploration of myself and my experiences, and shares with others the ways in which I experience and connect with my world.

ASH GOODWIN

Virginia Commonwealth University - MFA

I explore gendered power dynamics as experienced with various men, most of whom I met through a Craigslist post seeking models. My plan was to place myself in an unquestionable position of power via the camera and the gaze in combination with their nudity and performative role. But this work is just as much about what happened before and after the shoots as it is about the images themselves. With the internet as mediator, replies predictably included dick pics and insulting questions. Friends and colleagues often asked if I was being safe. Turns out, going into the woods alone with a man remains inadvisable. Despite the strategic dominance I had devised, I was reminded of my place.

After requesting to shoot in the homes of these men, our relationships became increasingly complicated. They told me about romantic difficulties and aging parents. Some tried to hire me for shoots of their own design, one paid me because he wanted to. Each attempt to assert control was thwarted. Did they see me as a friend, a woman, a girl? These interactions confirmed many problematic gender roles. I’ve answered hours of emails, offered price quotes and graciously accepted hyperbolic compliments. I am equally skeptical of my own motivations for entertaining these exchanges, and I’m not convinced those questions will yield honest answers. This project bargains for power, for a real and imagined place disentangled from our patriarchy.

AMANDA M. JOHNSON

Parsons School of Design

MFA in Photography

The series Come On Honey, You’re Gonna Love It was born from a desire to reject common objectifying and fetishizing notions associated with the Black female body. The images are influenced by everything from my personal and familial relationships to societal and art historical manners of portraying and discussing women. The associations being made are gathered from a combination of observation, experience, and literature. These images are stylized after Edward Weston images as a kind of reimagining of an era of image making which only featured the bodies of white women juxtaposed to or in conversation with objects.

Over the past year I’ve worked on the idea of bringing together art history and black history. Through these images, I grapple with fetishization, over-sexualization, mourning, performance both artistically and socially, and the most important part of my identity, hair.  The idea is to create an image encompassing the texture of skin and hair, the exposure and/or concealment of the body through light, and the relationship between the body and nostalgia.  These images bring to life both the literally and figurative textures of my identity and the larger Black female identity. 

Receiving the Inge Morath Award would allow me to obtain more materials to create images. These materials range from different kinds of lace fabric, wigs, wig stands, spray paint, technical camera equipment such as lenses, lights, audio recording technology and background seamless. 

KIERRA KUVAJA

East Carolina University - BFA

This work explores the experience of being detached from society to the point of questioning your own humanity. It is inspired by Osamu Dazai’s novel No Longer Human which follows the life of a man who had felt alienated from others since he was a child. He felt as though everyone around him were completely different and behaved in a way he couldn’t understand. He thought they were strange because even though they seemed to be insincere in their interactions they never feared or cared that anyone else was behaving the same way. He grew scared and distrustful of people because of this and created a façade to protect himself. He planned out all of his interactions with others and how he should properly respond to them, never allowing his true feelings and wants to show. This façade slowly grew how an invasive vine would; small, leafy, and even pretty, looking like it was always meant to be planted there. Like most vines do though it quickly grew out of control wrapping around most aspects of his life until he was engulfed and strangled by his own fears. I believe many of us today are being consumed by our own vines. We hide our true selves because of the fear and distrust we feel towards those around us and although we use this distance to protect ourselves it only aids in our loss of connection to the world. Through this project I am hoping that those of you who feel you have your own vines know that you aren’t the only one that maybe if we’re all a little more brave and learn to open up with each other we can lessen the distance between us.

DEANNA MAZZOLA

THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS

BFA IN PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO

This series, titled Exit 8A, features work created in New Jersey, my home. The project documents interiors, exteriors, and landscapes from around my hometown and other places that have been a part of my life through photographs and short videos. The title of this project refers to my town’s exit on the New Jersey Turnpike, the sign I see every time I go back home. I have developed an appreciation for my hometown during the times I have been away in the drastically different environment of New York City. The town, and the state itself, are filled with fields, forests, quiet streets and so much more that people don’t see when they pass through on the turnpike. The beautiful natural light of these places always captivates me. I am mesmerized when the sun floods the fields and my house, leaving unique shadows and a warm hue all around me. Because of this, light has had a large impact on my work. I fully realized this impact when I was away studying abroad for 5 months. I realized I was looking for the same aspects to include in my photographs as I do when I am home. I gained a new perspective and finally found my style of photography. Before this I was never fully satisfied with the work I was producing when I attempted to photograph my home.

For this series, I have now completely brought in this impact of light. The light activates my work to romanticize everyday places such as a kitchen and a laundry room sink. While there is an absence of people, their signs of living are present with their shoes, cups, towels, and other objects they left behind. This absence adds a quietness to the already poetic and calming scenes. I photograph the beautiful details of a simple suburban house that are brushed to the side, and the farm fields and deep woods that often go under appreciated. The audience will feel the passing of time as they view the photographs and videos. My town and other places that will be shown, are and forever will be important to me. This has been my main motivation for this series. The work that I have created are my memories that I will be sharing with my audience.

DANIELLE MERTENS

Missouri State University

BFA in Photography

Throughout my adolescent years, I struggled with depression and anxiety. Around age thirteen, I began self-harming. The cuts I carved into my skin only made me want to hide myself more than I already did. I became afraid of being viewed differently, labeled a freak, or being alienated. In recent years, the social conversation has moved in favor of talking about mental health. One aspect, self-harm, has been conspicuously absent in the social conversation. As an adult, I realize now that if I had felt comfortable talking about my harmful tendencies, someone may have been able to help or relate.

Through my work, I bring self-harm to the forefront of the conversation. It has been ignored for too long, and those of us who have experienced it deserve to know that despite having scars, we are still beautiful, still worthy, and not alone. Perhaps by sharing our experiences, we can be what we needed then for somebody now: a source of acknowledgement and acceptance.

My work consists of portraits of people who have experienced self-harm, photographed in their homes, specifically in bedrooms and bathrooms. These rooms are private, intimate spaces where this behavior often occurs. People keep their most private and treasured items in these spaces where outsiders cannot see-much as we often hide our scars. In these photographs, I have highlighted my subjects' scars with black makeup to this part of them cannot be ignored.

For those who have experienced self-harm, this project is an opportunity to relate your experiences to those of the models. You may be strangers, yet you know each other in a way no one else ever will. For people who haven't, this project is an opportunity for you to see that which has been hidden from you or that you have been told is not to be openly discussed. The only things keeping us from understanding each other is a conversation.

LINNEA MOODY

TRUMAN STATE UNIVERSITY

BFA in Studio Art

Having lived in the same small midwestern town of Kirksville, Missouri for my entire life, I often waver back and forth between viewing my surroundings as mundane or bursting with potential. Even though my surroundings often inspire me, I simultaneously feel trapped in a never ending cycle of familiarity. Through photography, I am able to take the mundane and manipulate it into something new and captivating. I start by documenting familiar places in my hometown through the lens of my camera. I then process each roll of film and intuitively choose negatives to enlarge and alter. Each one of my silver gelatin prints aims to break through the traditional restrictions of the darkroom and my environment by expanding the parameters of the photographic medium.

Traditionally the darkroom follows a step by step process, leaving room for creative freedom mainly in the negatives themselves and the contrast at which they are printed. In this body of work, I step beyond these traditional boundaries by folding the silver gelatin paper before the negative is projected or folding the negatives themselves to make contact prints. I find that the convergence of these multiple methodologies heightens the potential for conversation about the ways we view and interact with our familiar surroundings –depicted in the subject matter of each image. By physically altering the familiar through the photographic process, I draw attention to perception of the everyday.

KEVIN MOORE

MASSACHUSETTS COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN

BFA in Photography

Inspired by film and societal constructs of femininity, my work is an exploration on the formation of character, narrative, and identity. Drawing inspiration from domestic space, I construct each image in order to direct my own narrative. These photographs are a world created to speak freely without interruption. By utilizing the past--both historic and cultural references--I am able to juxtapose queer existence with classic Americana. Although my work is made up predominantly of self-portraits, my goal is for viewers to consider their own responses to queerness as they see it. By applying my own identity and queer experience, I hope to engage the viewer in an unfamiliar set of circumstances.

The photographs in my series ask: can we live comfortably outside the norm? How do these characters challenge the societal ideas of masculinity? Driven by emotion and intuition, I utilize melodrama to discuss ideas of visibility and invisibility, what is acknowledged and what is not-- questions that remain relevant in today’s politics.

MELISSA NUNEZ

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY

My work features photographs of American industrial ruins melting and merging into a new structure arising from the degraded environments produced by the fall of American manufacturing. It displays memory and potentiality reveal traces of what has become of our imagined future, and what can become a new future.

These structures embody the entropy of industrial modernism, created by its own hazardous waste. By using the Mordancage process, I willfully intervene in the construction of these images, seeking to revive, restructure, and reimagine an unknown future. Mordancage is a post-printing process technique done inside the darkroom that removes the emulsion off the silver gelatin prints, leaving a degraded effect and erasing spaces within the image. Erasing the photographs renders a thought of restoration, openness, and potential possibility within the industrial landscape.

KATHLEEN PETERSON

Massachusetts College of Art and Design - BFA

Today, it seems we all have the inability to sit still and pay attention. We might be watching a movie, listening to a lecture, or having a conversation. We tap our fingers, bounce our legs, look around the room. When we break eye contact, it can be construed as disinterest in the subject. However, this is not always the case. Often times, it is necessary to break our focus in order to regain it. I was told I had ADHD at the age of thirteen, and have been on medications ever since. While it is nearly impossible for me to complete daily tasks in a timely manner without them, I have noticed that it causes me to have a difficult time focusing on people that are talking. The sound of a voice continuing on and on, lecturing me- not conversing with me, would lull me into a trance. The person would become little more than a figure with a blur for a face, as I lose the ability to focus on the topic at hand. I look away from the person speaking, trying to gather my concentration so I can refocus. I hope to bring this mental state to life, and illustrate my frustration of needing a medication that both helps and hinders me through the use of portraiture. I want to recreate the mental image that comes to mind when this loss of focus occurs, both needing to look away from the subject, as well as the blurred figure when I do lose my focus, with the use of long exposures of moving faces and layered portraits.

MARY PULS

Belmont University

Design Communications

Noticing Existence is a photography project that came out of a time of loneliness. When I lived in a new place and knew no one, the only way to get through day to day was by making conversation with completely strangers. Fear often surrounds the idea of talking to people we do not know, but when people talk to each other, each individual feels like their existence as a person has been noticed and is worthwhile. Using a 4x5 film camera to photograph these encounters created space and time for authentic connection. Due to the nature of the camera, I could not hide behind it, but stood eye to eye with the subject as the shutter released. I attempted to break down some of the power dynamic that has played a prevalent role in photography since its invention. My project is simple in meaning and in call to action. I merely noticed and interacted with strangers and collaboratively created work together. The stranger is complicated, complex, and not always transparent. I do not know or understand these individuals any better than the next, but each one of them is tremendously important to me. Each photograph is named based on the conversation I had with the individual.

MADISON SCHWINDENHAMMER

Bradley University - Photography

These works from the series Pneuma explore humanity’s perception of the spiritual realm and how religion, beauty, nature, and culture impact our belief systems. Named after the Greek word for breath, spirit, or soul, this series examines notions of a creative life-force or spiritual realm. To create these works, I combine several images using digital collage methods to create new worlds that convey the relationship between humans and an ever-present life force. Using digitally generated and enhanced light sources and other collaged materials, I seek to create works that challenge the viewer to engage in a surreal world. These dream-like scenarios communicate a vast array of universal emotions including fear, awe, wonder, anticipation, suspense, and peace.

Challenging human emotion, these works investigate questions of origin and provoke one to consider realms of knowing beyond our known world. The creation of these pieces is drawn from my appreciation and reverence for diversity of conceptual and spiritual reasoning. Pneuma also showcases the sanctity of metaphysical spheres of supposition and experience. These works encourage viewers to explore divine thought and develop a new appreciation for a world situated beyond the tactile. My work does not aim to resolve questions about the world, but rather to provoke them and encourage viewers to introspectively consider their personal experiences and resulting beliefs.

DANA SMESSAERT

East Carolina University

MFA in Photography

An Obligation To Do One's Best is an exploration of myth and reality at home in a small southern town. The artist explores her displacement in the American South by confronting and acknowledging the violence of being a white woman in the South. These houses are monuments of confrontation. A reminder of the parallel between being a neighbor but also an outsider, living in the veil. W.E.B. Du Bois describes this boundary, both physical and metaphysically, between the North and South eloquently as a veil in his search for understanding the racial prejudices of the Jim Crow era. It is the threat of the artist's gaze that labels her as confrontational in the racial divide in this southern town. In these liminal landscapes, the viewer/spectator becomes a collaborator in the mythos of racism in the Southern narrative—the denial of not only its racist past but also the strides of the Civil Rights protests. The static images perpetuate the romanticism and storytelling the South is known for, while the occupants might well be complicit in the systemic racism or the victims of 400 years of injustice. The participants become faced with their understanding of how they see. The artist is calling into question who narrated these stories, whose history are we referencing, where does the root of our implications begin? Is it problematic that these houses cannot merely be houses? The American South, the house, the name, and the family's history are complicated and seemingly transparent to those on the outside. However, the stories of those who live here still exist in the space between myth and reality.

EMMA VIESER

UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, KNOXVILLE

BFA in 2D Studio Art, BA in Art History

Cameras and their relationship to memory play an important function in my work. Regardless if my final product is a photo collage or a form of printmaking, all of my art begins with photography. I am drawn towards simple point and shoot cameras, both digital and film, as they help to streamline the process of capturing amoment. From the photograph, I either create layered digital collages that emulate the feeling of a memory or a drawing to use in my prints in order to create a portrait of a memory. The work in Headspace, Homebody deals specifically with the ways that I process and fixate on nostalgia.

My photos are inspired by the work of Uta Barthe, whose abstract photographs of her surroundings serve as a way to learn to look closely at the ground that is always beneath your feet, or the shadows cast on your wall. I find looking closely at specific spaces, I spend most of my time in meditative observation, and find subjects for my photos this way. Strengthening my connection to a space by admiring the way that light filters in every evening is what fuels my desire to constantly revisit a memory of an old bedroom, and to make art about the windowsills I decorated there. Though I do not consider myself to be a “homebody,” I do find myself defined by the places I’ve lived. Most of my art for this thesis project is based around the house Ilived in last year, as it was the first time I felt an emotional connection to a place and considered it home.

In my photo collages, layering and repetition are analogous to the way we blend together and fixate on memories. These collages, though sourced from photographs that are direct documentation, are conceived as “misrememberings” of a space. I am more interested in using my photography to create false memories than true ones, as it is more in line with how our memories function. Our memories are often codified through photographs, yet every time we recall a memory, it becomes less true, and every layer that I add to a collage is a step removed from the photographic truths.

My work in print and textiles is a way for me to make these false memories tangible in a way that digital photography doesn’t allow. By taking elements of my collages and printing them on fabric or rag paper, these memories become physical objects. Stitching them together creates new connections between otherwise unrelated memories, further enhancing their presence as well as their inherent falsehoods.

Though I am more than the places that I’ve been, the homes that I have lived in have shaped me into who I am today. Ultimately the work in Headspace, Homebody is an ode to the life I lived in a big old house on Baxter Avenue.

NOLAN WARNER-SULLIVAN

APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY

BFA IN STUDIO ART

When I go out to make photographs I do not know what I am going to see most of the time. Even on roads I walk every day, different people end up in front or behind me as I make my way to and from my classes, the light falling differently across the world as days grow longer or shorter. I move down the street very quickly most days, making several photographs per block, often moving with no destination in mind as I snake my way across the sidewalk or through a park. Shooting in this style with a half-frame camera allows for me to print happenstance diptychs and triptychs in the darkroom from physically attached negatives. These unplanned sequences have the ability to prompt the viewer to fabricate non-existent narratives based off of their individual experiences which they bring to the individual images, making sense of their sequence through the precedent of their own lives. This sort of fabrication mirrors both my exploration while out shooting photographs as well as the process I use to select which sequences of images will be printed together as they are paired with contextual and formal elements in mind.