Subject: OMG

This semester I have been teaching a "Contemporary Practice" course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yesterday we had our final critique for the semester and I was really pleased with the work that was hung on the wall. Here is some work by the students, you can click on the images to see a larger view:


This is the work of Caitlin Leonard. Caitlin spent the final month of the semester documenting the life of her thirteen year old sister and the social dynamics of suburban youth. The images were paired with pages from her sister's myspace.com account.


These are the photographs of Jaime Kim. Jaime became interested in photographing scenes from the underground subway here in Chicago. Her pictures capture the disorienting blur of life as a commuter.


These photographs are by Julius Dorsey. Julius is a painter and he works a lot with the color red. Earlier in the semester he made a photograph that informed this project. He would stay in one place with his camera on a tripod and photograph every person that would walk through his frame wearing the color red. He then composited all of his photographs so that everyone in the scene would be wearing red (even down to the cars and street lights).


This installation is by Lauren Christiansen. Lauren decided to create a family "photo wall" for her final project and skipped lunch to make sure that it was hung just right. We talked a lot about Nan Goldin's work as well as Christian Marclay's "White Noise" piece.


These photographs are by Micah Schippa. Micah's work of fantastical characters inspired a conversation about Anna Gaskell's work (she was a visiting artist earlier in the semester). I thought that the above photograph was made under water ... I was wrong.


Misato Inaba's work examines overlooked mundane artifacts and images of social isolation. I love how the rust on the back of the street sign mimics the pattern of the clouds and her image of the lone girl with shadow is slightly unnerving.


Ryan Uhm spent the final month of the semester creating a series of large scale digital panoramas. The top image was shot over the course of a number of hours from the vantage point of The Field Museum here in Chicago and the bottom panorama was made in Wisconsin. I love the blue lens flare in the rural landscape!


Finally there was Sebastian Alvarez who was our resident performance artist. Sebastian is interested in photographing surreal scenes in everyday places and has a remarkable knowledge of contemporary art. The above images are from two different series and I look forward to seeing how they evolve.

Well, that was our final crit at The Art Institute and you can color me impressed.