My mother told me that she knew I would be an artist because I had been creating things since I was a baby. When I graduated from high school, I knew I wanted to be an artist because I was intrigued and curious. I realize now that I have grown and feel that I am becoming an artist because I am driven by the relentless need to create, share ideas, and explore the world and its infinite possibilities.
As a photography major I have attended courses on technique, theory, history, philosophy, and literature. I have learned about hundreds of artists who have shaped and nurtured what art is for me. But I feel as if I am lacking the tools I need to allow my work to develop beyond the two-dimensional printed image. The Yale Norfolk Summer Program will be my opportunity to reach beyond my artistic boundaries and enrich my practice while also contributing to the group dialogue from a photographer’s perspective.
Through the course of my college education I have been exploring what art is and what opportunities exist for artists. While creating my own work, I have assisted my peers with their projects to engage different processes. Last summer I worked as a photographer at the Getty Center through their Multicultural Internship Program and experienced the museum environment. I am currently doing an exchange in Berlin and have since become a Photo Editorial Intern at Unlike.net while attending courses at Universität der Künste where I have experienced a completely different teaching method. The next and most important aspect of the art world that I need to explore is that of the working studio artist.
My most recent finished project titled “the Hitchhiker Projection” is a series of seven portraits and seven panels of text. The piece was created in exploration of my evolving relationships with the seven people that have been closest to me throughout my life. I was very interested in the recurring problematic impression that photographs are factual. I wanted to challenge the viewer to investigate their trust in the relationship between the images and the text so I juxtaposed a false narrative with formal studio portraits to arouse close examination and a jarring of the sense that images represent truth.
If I am able to participate in the Yale Norfolk Summer Program I will be working more with image and text. I have been doing extensive research on other artists exploring the image/text relationship and have some found text-based materials that I am highly interested in incorporating into a piece. I am also currently doing research on the structure of language and am trying to expand my understanding of how text influences and changes works of art in our society today.
Since I have been in Berlin I have experienced an escalated sense of artist community and feel that I have thrived in this supportive and constructively critical atmosphere that I think will also exist at Yale Norfolk. I recently visited the Bauhaus Archive and felt inspired by the notion of a tight knit, hard working group of artists taught by established artists and teachers, all devoted to enhancing their knowledge of various mediums and methods. They were driven by the belief that knowledge is exponentially valuable and that every new method opens up multiple opportunities of not only creation but also inspiration. I felt stimulated by the thought of each person influencing, teaching, and learning from each other in the pursuit of greater understanding. I feel an utmost desire to work within an environment such as this one and it would be a great privilege to take part in the Yale Norfolk Summer Program because it embodies all of these ideas.
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