Ideas- Phenomenon- Susan Worsham

Susan Worsham 
By: Raven Mrozek

Susan Worsham, born in Richmond, Virginia, is considered to be a recent emerging artist. She took her first photography class in college while she was studying graphic design. Her work is both metaphorical and aesthetically soft and stunning. I am in love with her interpretation on memory and how she combines both beauty and loss together into a single image.  



Bittersweet on Bostwick Lane is Susan Worsham's series that most directly speaks to this idea of both the beauty and loss in a memory. Worsham discussed in her artist statement how she has lost bother of her parents, however the suicide of her brother is what makes its way into her works and shapes the way she photographs. I noticed she incorporated honeysuckle, stains, and red in a lot of images metaphorically tying together the loss and the beauty. Worsham shared the first line of her brothers suicide letter which said "I arrived home just about the time the honeysuckle blooms" which made me as a viewer create a connection with the use of the honeysuckle. She expressed how beautiful yet sad it was that her brother took in the beauty of his surroundings knowing it would be his last time. This loss and attention to beauty seeped into this series Bittersweet on Bostwick Lane. The sweet memories Worsham incorporated in the series were buttering her brother's bread growing up, homemade strawberry jelly, the intangible landscape, and sweet flowers. There is a sense of poetry in how she photographs.






By The Grace of God is another beautiful series of Susan Worsham that I enjoy. The title of this series comes from the old saying "American by birth, southern but the grace of god." Her series explores her past home from the neighbor yards to the hospitality of the surrounding peoples, and the character strangers had in welcoming her into their home and telling their story. 

Event Review - Kevin Miyazaki - Artist Now! lecture

Kevin Miyazaki
Event Review
Raven Mrozek

Kevin Miyazaki's artist lecture was not only interesting and thought provoking as far as subject matter and concept, but it also was very beneficial in regards to his discussion on commercial photography. He spoke on where his photography began and how it grew commercially. He began as a simple newspaper photographer creating documentary photographs that were mass spread. From here he landed jobs with the Cincinnati Magazine as well as the Milwaukee Magazine. The calm aesthetic in his images aid him in his freelance commercial photography, having taken many portrait and many portraits of artists. 
 
Kevin Miyazaki's discussion on commerce showed me that it is possible to go anywhere with your photography, and sometimes the best place to start is small at a local paper. From there you can create your own archive of public images tracing back to you allowing your photography to grow in the commerce element of art; it can even take you to other countries. Kevin Miyazaki's statement on how when photographing in other countries, a smile is the most universal language stood out to me. My mom always told me this same thing when growing up and I feel it is important understand this especially when photographing where people may not speak the same verbal language as you.

Aside from commerce, there is art. I resonated most with Kevin Miyazaki's photography discussing his family history. He utilizes family images his works as well as uses his family history to drive his concepts. Intertwining re purposed images and stories from his family's past is something I am currently working on in my photo project on family memory.

Ideas/Fantasm - Matthew Gamber

Matthew Gamber
Defining The Ephemeral Nature of Photography
by David Kieckhefer

Matthew Gamber explores the ephemeral image in a variety of ways with and without cameras. Eventually all surfaces decay and images fade, but Gamber embraces the fleeting nature of the image that is created by light and is eventually destroyed by it. His exhibition, Unfixed, brings together objects and images that cause us to consider mortality, time and memory, and the beauty of moments that can never last.

Installation shot from exhibition UNFIXED: The Fugitive Image

"Gamber's new project, Any Color You Like, is a bit like losing the sense of taste right as you are about to bite into something you have been looking forward to eating, and the expectation of that enjoyment usually comes from the memory of having eaten it before.  By removing the memory and one of the senses, the experience changes. Gamber's images look at objects that we have traditionally seen in color and that speaks to the idea of color, and force us to see and think about them anew."
- Aline Smithson

Matthew Gamber holds a BFA from Bowling Green State University and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University. He is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the College of the Holy Cross, having previously taught at Lesley University College of Art and Design, Boston College, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Savannah College of Art and Design, Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He has also previously worked on archive and digitization projects with Harvard University and the Boston Public Library for Digital Commonwealth.

Identity - Memory - Eva Stenram

by Morgan

Eva Stenram, originally from Sweden, is a London based artist who creates work by digitally cutting up existing images, primarily from vintage pornography and erotica. Her work has been featured in magazines such as Aperture, W, and Esquire.

When first looking at Stenram's work, I was very curious as to why she would fall into the category of memory, as I wasn't hit with that feeling when just simply viewing her work. She has a body of work in progress since 2004 called pornography/forest_pics, but by simply viewing these images I was even more lost. 

pornography/forest_pic_1

Her website is very simple, clean, and has minimal information visible when viewing images, but after clicking through a handful of these images, I realized there was a "more information" link. That's when the artist statement swooped in and saved the day. 

http://www.evastenram.co.uk/pages/mum-11.htm

"pornography/forest-pics is a series based on hardcore pornographic images that are set within or around forests. The pictures were found on the Internet and downloaded, after which the human bodies were digitally removed. The bodies are digitally removed from each shot by copying and repeating the surrounding landscape, creating visual scars within the image. Our gaze is redirected to the overlooked part of the image. The viewer is left to to complete the scene imaginatively. The photographs, once denuded of their ‘action’, also bring to mind police forensic photography, as though these were the sites of forbidding, if unnamed, events. The forest setting complements this ambiguity: at once a place of beauty and danger, of obscuring and clearing, a public as well as a private space. Its quasi-repetition throughout the series both reproduces the banality of porn itself and elaborates a typography of spaces. The human bodies in many cases gets replaced by the ground, become earth, dust and debris."

Knowing now what this work really is, I'm so much more intrigued. It's a take on the idea of memory I wouldn't have thought of myself. She removes the central focus of these images, and even though we don't ever see the original images, we're left to wonder what was once there. Although I don't find most of these images hold my interest on their own, having the information about the work makes me love the work. I'm always blown away by the ideas other artists create.