XPI Student Showcase
Welcome to Xpress Plugged In, our new online gallery of student expressions. Please follow the submission instructions CAREFULLY. New work will be posted every Monday.
-- Nancy Green, editor of XPI
Selections for the Week of 6/13/2011
Spotlight on Chris Serrano, 12th grade
Howard W. Blake High School, Tampa
Artist Statement
--Chris Serrano
As an artist, I enjoy taking the simple things in life and re-envisioning them as beautiful pieces of art. Whether it is an empty field, an urban landscape or the simple manipulation of a light source, my goal is to represent photography as a creative art form. I live by something Ansel Adams once said: "You don't take a photograph, you make it."
With every image, I convey a variety of different emotions: love, hate, lust, loneliness, creation, beauty, the cerebral, the ugly, the destroyed, the hope, the joy. When I shoot, I aim to capture shreds of the human condition and reassemble them into a piece of art. Whether my meaning is obvious or abstract, the greatest reward in my work is for a viewer to connect, understand and be affected by my work.
Recently I have been working on a series called Memento. This series features photographs with intensified or darkened skies against low-saturated foregrounds. The subjects of the foregrounds are empty locations that evoke a sense of hidden memories. However, these memories are dictated by the viewer. Contact and In Dreams are examples of this series.
Apart from this series, I indulge myself in finding new ways to manipulate light. My most recent exploit was a series of photographs that I created with my muse of a girlfriend Tiffany, a pair of glow sticks and my Canon set to an exposure that required my tripod. The products of this night of light painting were quite a few photographs, most notable being one titled Insomnia, which won me a nice place in this year's Drexel University High School Photography Contest Exhibition.
Digital photography by Chris Serrano, 12th grade,
Howard W. Blake High School, Tampa
Insomnia
Contact
Distance
In Dreams
Blue