Alumna in the Arctic

I have the opportunity to spend three weeks in Svalbard, Norway for an artistic residency on board a barkentine sailboat as a resident in the Arctic Circle Residency. My work explores the spirit of human exploration and the history of Arctic expeditions.You can imagine how being immersed in that same extreme environment will impact the…

Interview With Nona Faustine

Tell me about the title of your show.The title Reconstructions comes from the Reconstruction Era a period in our country after the civil war that focused on the transformation of the Southern States. It was a significant chapter in the history of civil rights in the US, so the title lends itself to that term,…

Ed Stifles

When I first heard that I had a mere five minutes to present my work at Slidefest, I felt anxious. Every associative concept and tangential project I’d worked on felt too important to leave out. That five-minute time limit started to feel suffocating. I decided to narrow my options down. What was at the core of…

Discovering New Worlds

Photography has this incredible breadth to it. Photographs have been made of everything from DNA and microorganisms to stars, galaxies and nebulas. Pictures have come back to us from the farthest reaches of space and the depths of the ocean, from high above us and deep underground. What photography is also fantastic at is using…

A Lesson in Liking

My initial reaction to the pressures of grad school was to cling on to photographers whose work I thought was beautiful. I felt overwhelmed by the multitude of directions I could take my work, and thought (rightly so) that looking at other artists' work would spur me on. I decided on Rinko Kawauchi, and started…

Redheaded Peckerwood

A fifty year old murder-spree across the northern plain states inspired one of the most highly praised photobooks of 2011. It's nearly impossible to keep up with the constant influx of new, different, and beautifully printed publications, but there are sometimes those that seem to rise above the rest. Redheaded Peckerwood is one of those…

Rrrrrrrroll

RRRRRRROLL is a tumblr of simple, amusing, and sometimes beautiful gifs. They are lovely but largely uninteresting photographs, however the imposed movement brings out something in them that was perhaps largely forgettable or overlooked otherwise. It's yet another innovative use of the gif format, but enhanced by the quality and complexity of the scenery, the expressive…

The Essential Tool

So my essential tool is an essential internal force. I have had a lifelong propensity towards disorganization, overlooking details, and sloppiness due to haste. This has manifested itself in all parts of my life, from my chicken-scrawl handwriting and lost points on algebra tests to forgetting to check my aperture before shooting and misplacing papers I intended to read.…

Interview with Qiana Mestrich by Kathy Akey

Tell me about the title of your show. I've always been interested in how metaphors are used in daily language. If you break the phrase down, another definition of the word "dead" means "precise," like "dead center". The word "ringer" comes from a 19th-century horse racing term used to describe a horse substituted for another…

Kathy’s List or: How I Procrastinate and Learn at the Same Time

Because I didn't study art or photography in undergrad, I had to strengthen my eye on my own time. These are my favorite go-to resources for inspiration, reference, and time wasted looking at pictures I wish I'd taken and projects I wish I had thought of first.Plenty of ColourExactly what it sounds like, and it…