Art School 2008-2020
These photographs evolved from being casual photographs simply documenting the teaching process, to becoming focused shoots, with the students’ permission, at a point in their production where they are immersed in making but the materials have not coalesced into finished objects. At a certain point I was realizing that I might not be in those contexts again and wanted to document these strange sites of activity. Having given a lot of thought to the condition and future of art schools, I felt almost like a 19th-century landscape painter, feeling the need to represent a threatened landscape.
Each image is a student’s cubicle sized working space, and (for me) function as portraits of that person and the things they surrounded themselves with. The titles of the photographs name the students, the year, and the program they were in. The triptychs become collective portraits of the group; their material and conceptual concerns, their similarities and differences.
These digital prints are banner-size horizontal triptychs, ranging in format from 19" x 75" to 24" x 99", images made with a Canon 5D camera, printed on Epson matte roll paper.
They also exist as a boxed set of 36 prints, 6.5 x 24" on Hannemuhle paper, which includes essays by myself, and Josh Shannon, an art historian of contemporary art at University of Maryland.
A pdf of the set with essays can be downloaded from this web site under "Book Projects".
