Lower Ninth Ward, N.O.L.A.

Images from BFA Show

Face Value: Marilyn Monroe, Bill Cosby, Mickey Mouse and Osama BinLaden
(Not in Order)

50 Worms Processing Photographs

BFA Photography Exhibition

Dec 3-7

Cora Stafford Gallery and the University of North Texas is
pleased to present 4 four an exhibition of
B.F.A. Photography candidates Sierra DaSilva, Sarah
Dunlap, Micheal Anton Herbert, and Shinichi Kimoto. A
closing reception honoring the artists will be held
Friday, December 7th from 6-9 p.m.

Sierra DaSilva’s work is influenced by social
and
environmental documentary photography. Her photographs
are observations of the varying ways people interact
with outdoor environments. The photographs are
intended to prompt thoughts about how we use our land,
and how we relate to it in our time spent outside.

Sarah Dunlap explores the vital human attribute of
memory through a self-explorative series: 31
photographs taken over a few months period exploring
her perception and recollection of the world around
her. Through these photographs, she hopes viewers will
become aware of their own visual surroundings and
processes of recollection.

Michael Anton Herbert draws from western cultural
constructs to look at photography in a new way. Using
media including computer algorithms and live
composting worms, Herbert’s new work examines aspects
of visual media and it’s relationship to social
attitudes regarding fame, technology and mortality.

Shinichi Kimoto’s
work establishes a new aesthetic
standard. In the series, “Surface:The Perfection of
Cyber Beauty,” natural and artificial aspects of
models/objects are emphasized in order to explore the
possibility of developing a cyber form of beauty.

Cora Stafford Gallery is located in Oak Street Hall at
1120 West Oak Street in Denton, Texas 76201. Gallery
hours are 10:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m., Tuesday through
Friday.

Domestic Landscapes

The typical American operates on a pulse, traveling through about 2.3 million cubic feet of space each day. The heart of this pulse is an enclosed twenty one thousand cubic feet of static space inside which our daily routine begins and ends. This is the average American home.

My intention with this work is to explore the relationships that we have to this domestic space and the structures that enclose it. I have included the human element among the inherent visual obstructions of interior residential architectural as part of a “Domestic Landscape,” surveying the depth of these spaces through thresholds and mirrors to uncover natural interactions taking place. I have utilized the existing physical barriers of the home in employing double exposures to give these images a temporal element. This added sense of time reveals a kind of resonating Pythagorean energy caused by human movement through space designed specifically for human living. I hope to explore how the home becomes a living organism of its own as people interact with domestic space over time. Each of these images is printed on an enlarger from a single negative with no digital manipulation.

Face Value

There is a process through which one becomes a public symbol. In this process, faces are iconized. They are photographed, digitized, disseminated as data and received by the public via computer, press or television. For most of us, they have no existence independent of this media. They become archetypes as we make associations, attaching ideas and emotions to them independent of personal experience. I hope for this work to provoke analysis of these associations. Using photographs of iconic faces published on the internet, I simplify each one into a small number of basic elements. I then upsample the file, allowing an algorithm to fill in data to blend these elements. This transforms the computer into a collaborative creator. The images still retain a simplified skeleton from the original representational portraits but their context becomes homogenized once they are resampled past recognition and compiled together. The viewer is faced with references to a variety of contrasting archetypes without the comfort of formal visual identifiers to discern between them. In allowing imaging software to play an active role in this homogenization, I hope to raise questions regarding how advancements in technology influence the visual information we receive and how visual media effects our perception of the world around us.

Monday

Shoulder