Rebecca Villarreal presents Rebecca Villarreal

Okay so just to clarify from the start, I'm not blogging about my own work, I was bored the other day and decided googling myself would cure me of being bored. In then end I found two Rebecca Villarreal's who were photographers and the rest is this blog.

Rebecca's work is defiantly different from mine, I would probably describe her as an alternative landscape photographer. She does both color and black and white photography and seems to have a good eye for both....though I think her color work might be my favorite. Anyways breaking down both portfolios, in her color portfolio she has a more traditional approach to the landscape showing scenes of the beach and sand dunes. The most striking part of the photos are the skies, if she did in photoshop at all to the work she did just enough. It doesn't look to far over done and it doesn't look too grey, if any of that makes sense. The thunder heads just over power the viewer and take up a good portion of the work, but I'm okay with that because I'm not let down on the color. The best way I can describe the work is its just enough.

Her black and white images take on what I would call an alternative landscape, she zooms in on her subjects so much that they are slightly out of focus if not completely out of focus. And this maybe bad of me, but I do enjoy an out of focus picture if its done right. She does it right with her triptych of the beach foam is gorgeous, when I looked at it for the first time I got a loose sense of water before knowing the title and once I read the title. I was quite happy knowing my guess was right but it wasn't upon first glance just a picture of water. Also I have to say she was clever in how she decided to make her triptych pieces different sizes than the traditional equal thirds. She did a great job keeping texture in her pictures, I think some of the images maybe a little too gray but I still enjoy looking at them.

Overall its lovely work and I hope she continues producing artwork.

Chris Castillo presents Gaye Chan

I first came across Gaye Chan when I was researching what kind and caliber of work was coming out of Hawaii in the photography programs at the University of Hawaii system.

Chan’s photography mixes aspects of archival practice with fine art. By juxtaposing images and overlapping physical and psychological narratives, she subverts expectations of what is happening in an image and why.

This work addresses ownership of meaning and of de/constructed experiences. Race, gender, and class are all easy points of entry for discussion regarding her work.

For more info, visit:

http://online.sfsu.edu/~amkerner/memory/chan.htm.

http://www.gayechan.com/

Andrea Couture submits Susan Burnstine

Susan Burnstine is a photographer who takes inspiration from dreams. She says that as a child she had vivid nightmares that would stick with her for days. As a way to cope with this and understand her dreams better, she started creating photographs. She has worked on a trilogy called "In Shadows" that consists of three different chapters, "On Waking Dreams", "Between", and "Flight". For the series, she created 21 handmade cameras so that she could create the type of photos she wanted in camera (instead of in post-processing).

I really enjoyed viewing Burnstine's work within the trilogy. It is interesting to see the different way her handmade cameras create elements. I really enjoy her work and I feel that it could influence the direction I would like to take in my work this semester.

To view more of her work, here is her website:

http://www.susanburnstine.com/index.htm