It is always good to see some of our teachers’ work. Like that we can know what’s their perspective about making in their own field.
This are some of the notes I made out of their presentations of their work.

 

Tuan

He presented about his work in 3 different categories: For His Father, For Friends/Others, and For the University. Some of the works he showed “500 doodles in index cards”, boxes with digitally managed prints, invitations, menus, tea boxes, organic rice boxes, comic books/children books, bags with prints on, paper bags with prints and names on, photo books, flyers and certificates, theater installations, “10000 hours”, Command G flyers and projects for workshops.

In general, I think his work is very clean and balanced, very based in a minimalist aesthetic. In general I like minimalist works -I work a lot that aesthetic too-, but in my opinion he tends to push too much the negative space, which makes his work too “blank space based”. It is not a bad thing at all, it is just that personally  I am not a very big fan of huge enclosing blank areas, unless that negative space works as part of the piece and not just as a background or canvas.

 

Hollis

Her work is highly memory-based. She is very interested in natural disasters and how our memories affect us. For her, truth’s relativity depends on how each person perceives ‘the remains’, how each person remembers, how their minds collect memories. Her installations, drawings, paintings and 3D wood drawings relate to this idea of memory and collecting towards building our own truths. I really like her work from an aesthetic perspective, and the conceptualization behind it relates also to my own perspective of reality’s construction and the creative process.
Some of the works she presented are “Memory… the left-over pieces”, “Ruby’s House”, the “Aftermath” series, “Empty Vessels”, “Smoke Rising”.

 

Bill

“Life is not Linear”. That is what he said when he started his presentation. And after that little phrase I completely understood his background and the ‘why’ behind and underneath his production. He says that ideas lead, and lately he has been very interested in quantum mechanics. He started in Photo Journalism, then he turned towards a more documentary production. “Rodeo in Texas Prison” and his black and white series of landscapes led him to portraits, and then to a commercial portraits work -with all the high intensity and high speed work related, all the before-hand planning and everything. But commercial photo was not enough and he turned to the idea of Time as a way of letting the landscape speak in photos. He started making long exposure pics of water and landscape -first in film (black and white), then in digital (color). This production relates to Tantric Paintings and meditation, which influenced his work and made him take a more minimal and almost calligraphic way of presenting and developing his artwork.
I loved how he stated pictures as ‘layers of reality’. things overlap and create what we see. And yes, that is reality: a pile of things put together and experienced by beings in a way of creating meaning and order to this pile.

 

—-***—-

Future seems so far from now, and it is just a second ahead. In five more years I see myself in grad school -I’m not sure if in Chile or here-, but I do not know if that is going to happen. But I will try my best. How will I do it? Breaking my back with hard work and studies. I love studying and that will be my path to reach any goal I set to myself.