Year in Reflection

Looking back over the course of the year I believe the project I was most engaged in was the Artist in Residence Project. Throughout the duration of this project I believe I developed and began to understand my voice as an artist. I believe when I was outside taking photos, I was able to reflect by myself for an extended period of time. In that time I thought about how I wanted to incorporate my conceptual intention into my photos. When I take photos I photograph the environment, more specifically, water. During the previous project I went to Cronkite beach to take pictures and I feel while I was there I was in a sense lost in the materials. I just stayed out on the beach, took photos and just reflected on everything. This was a meaningful time of growth for me as an artist and I am really happy I went out that day to take photos. This year has been really essential to my growth as an artist. I believe my overall practice has improved through being more productive, my conceptual intentions and finally an better understanding of composition and use of the camera. Towards the beginning of the year there many times I found myself sitting in class not knowing how to use the time effectively, but as the year progressed I believe I improved in finding ways to consistently be working on something related to my project. Throughout the first parts of the year I had trouble finding a theme with conceptual intentions to implement into my project. But towards the end of the year after reflection and talks with both you and Mr. O, I have found a theme that I would like to continue unpacking and developing throughout the next year into portfolio. I believe this has been my biggest improvement as an artist this year. Now for my actual photos, I feel hat I have been progressively improving with each project in terms of my practice and composition of each photo. I am gaining a more adept understanding of how to use the camera and editing tools to evoke the message I want to get across with each photo. I felt very comfortable with just taking photos and I think towards the end of the year that comfort was shown as I sort of took risks going to take photos, as a result some of the photos I took were either great or were just terrible. I really enjoyed the collaborative project. I thought it was really fun to make a sculpture and then photograph it. It was a long and rough process to make that sculpture but I thought the final photos we had were really intriguing. From my projects I think that my Artist in Residence project was my most successful as I was extremely happy with my final pictures of the series. The most frustrating project was the artist as activist project. I had the conceptual intentions for the project but I had a lot of trouble trying to implement these intentions into a compelling photo. I did have a couple photos at the end of the project that were not too bad but I feel this project was the most difficult and frustrating for me. Ms. Seal has some crazy meditation skills… No but for real, I think you give some great advice that has helped me develop and help me grow as an photographer the last two years. In my experience I think that advice I would give to the class is maybe have more projects for the photographers to work on. I like the very vague project guidelines but at time I became a little bored towards the end of the projects and I feel that I could have benefited from having another project to work on. Other than that I really enjoyed art this year and cant wait for portfolio next year!