Author: MFA Photo

Dog Days on the Chaparral

Dog Days on the Chaparral is an installation comprised of three photographic sculptures made in response to the question, “where are you from?” Although I define myself as both Portuguese and American, as someone who immigrated as a child, my identification as either ebbs and flows. The work embodies this slipperiness—a complicated emotional geography. To do so, I fabricate sculptures which collage images of two landscapes, the California chaparral and Portuguese montado, as proxies for these two homes and identities. I employ vernacular building materials, such as lumber and common fasteners, to create a literal and conceptual framework to which I affix an arrangement of contoured photographs. Hacking together disparate materials and technologies to create multi-layered sculptures reflects the Sisyphean efforts made to collage together a sense of home and belonging. The resulting photo objects are both visual and haptic and function as icons or shrines soliciting quiet contemplation of a place just beyond reach. When I contemplate these photo objects, I reflect on my family, our history, in this country and the old country, and collapse the distance between me and that narrative. Although the body of work is rooted in my idiosyncratic immigration experience, it reflects a wider migrant narrative. It may take generations for migrants and their descendants to feel grounded again when forces like poverty and conflict cause homes and nations to crumple like paper.

Hugo Teixeira grew up in the Luso-American community in San Jose, California. A linguist by training, he studied photography at San Jose State University and Lisbon’s Escola Técnica de Imagem e Comunicação and is currently a candidate in the MFA in Photography and Related Media program at Rochester Institute of Technology. His artwork relies on photography, common materials, advanced technical skillsets and memory to create contemporary conceptual sculptures. As an artist and teacher, Hugo has exhibited work in the United States, Portugal, and the Macau Special Administrative Region of China. See more of his work at http://hgtx.net/.

You Know that Feeling You Get Right After You Vomit? Yeah, I Want to Feel That.

You Know that Feeling You Get Right After You Vomit? Yeah, I Want to Feel That uses digitally manipulated self-portraiture, visual metaphor, found object sculptural forms, and surrealistic imagery, to navigate what it means to exist between social boundaries such as sexual orientation, race, or culture through the surrealistic realization of abjection and uncanniness. Such “in-betweeness” is represented by images of my body fractured and separated into limbs and torsos as a metaphor for the split psyche. By referencing traditional tropes within art history, such as flowers, fruit, the nude, and death portraiture, I redefine myself in my own terms from the ground up.

Born in Ithaca, NY, in 1995, Jin Chan is an MFA candidate RIT Photo and Related Media program currently living in Rochester, NY, where he has taught Intro to Digital Photography and worked in the William Harris Gallery. He is an active member of the local cosplay community.

Because the Sun Hath Looked Upon Me

Because the Sun Hath Looked Upon Me is a photographic project positioned at the intersection of cosmology, philosophy, and spirituality. Combining multiple images using Photoshop I create imaginative landscapes and self-portraits. The landscapes are symbols of the promised land; the ground references the physical world, the sky becomes a canvas for projection and imagination, and the horizon acts as a symbol for the liminal space between the physical and ethereal. The portraits introduce a new way to envision my Black identity through the power of the cosmos. This body of work is rooted in the Afrofuturist movement, which redefines the Black identity through science fiction, mythology, and technology. I construct a space where Blackness is immanent and expands through space. The Yoruba cosmological concept of ase is said to be the power provided by the Eternal One that sustains the cosmos, similar to the idea of dark matter being the force that holds the universe together. At the core of this body of work is the expansion of selfhood and how we choose to define ourselves. Racial stereotypes and judgments hinder our understanding of who we are. I want to reduce the idea of separateness that is a result of racial labelling and categorization by placing Blackness in the field of the ever-expanding depths of the cosmos, allowing it to be boundless and infinite.

Granville Carroll is a visual artist currently based in Rochester, NY working mainly in the photographic medium. He grew up on the West coast having spent time in California, Washington State, and Arizona. He attended Mesa Community College, and after graduating with his Associate in Art he went on to receive his BFA in Art Photography (Summa Cum Laude) from Arizona State University. He is currently a 2nd year MFA candidate in the Photography and Related Media program at Rochester Institute of Technology. Carroll’s work deals with topics of representation, identity, and is influenced by Afrofuturism and spirituality. His work strives to shift perspectives using the healing powers of art. Carroll examines the literal representation of those labeled as black and the metaphorical symbolism behind what black represents. In this newest work, Because the Sun Hath Looked Upon Me, he redefines blackness by paralleling it with African culture, myth, and cosmology.

Cruces

https://vimeo.com/400723246

Cruces is a multimedia installation depicting immigrants’ conditions through landscapes, Latinx communities, and borderlands. Made during the last two years, the work is a multivocal ethnography of immigrants with varying legal statuses, countries of origin, and stages in their journey. The imagery is composed by the distributed yet relational geographies of the immigrants and structured to highlight the constitutive elements of transit, such as trains, immigrants’ hubs in US cities, as well as the obstacles they have to face in their transit, such as forests, rivers, and deserts.
The fieldwork for this project was made in three major immigration-related settings: cities along the US East Coast, US-Mexico borderlands, and the southern Mexico states. The project explores the ideas of citizenship of immigrants once settled, the relations on borders and immigrants’ hazardous experiences, and the operation of the so-called “expanded borders” in Mexico. 
In the work, photographs, maps, video and personal notes are interrelated into a fragmented whole, to infer the complexity and difficulty of representing such a broad and complex subject matter.

I’m Carlos, from Medellín, Colombia. I’m a multimedia maker and social researcher interested in documentary arts. I work with photography, video, and sound and my investigations are focused on social issues such as immigration, inequality, and violence and their implications in modern societies.
My education as a social anthropologist is the basis for the academic and political structure of my work. I reflect using artistic means, but at the same time, I am trying to decode and theorize on social phenomena to find clues to the origins of the structural problems.
I’m an MFA Candidate in Photography and Related Media at Rochester Institute of Technology College of Arts and Design. I joined the RIT community in 2018 thanks to a fellowship from Colfuturo, an agency from the Ministry of Education of Colombia.

In Praise of Shadows

In Praise of Shadows is a body of work that explores and pushes the boundaries and meanings of photographic materials, apparatus, and perception. This project started with the desire to challenge the traditional view of photography as a purely representational medium and reveal its hidden processes. Photographs have always been something to look through; what is shown in the image area matters. In praise of shadows utilizes basic photographic elements, camera, paper, and photo-sensitive materials as subjects to challenge the perception of photography as simply something to look through. Each work in In Praise of Shadows exhibits varying characteristics that reveal the dimensionality of photography, turning photographic prints into sculptural form, emphasizing the act of taking photographs, and revealing time both in viewing the photograph and making it. In Praise of Shadow opens a dialogue about photography itself and asks the viewers to see photography differently.

Jiageng Lin is a Chinese artist currently based in Rochester, NY. His work centers on photography’s basic elements: light, time, camera obscura, and photographic materials.