A note from Wendi: I am incredibly excited to add a new Blogger to my rotation. I met Shelby Mathis while our husbands were stationed together in the Azores, and she has also come and worked on our farm! She will be posting on Mondays!
An additional note from Shelby: What I try to accomplish when working in this space is to present another way -- a way of hope. Hope means we don't have to think about conflicts and borders in such a binary way. The views presented are entirely my own. Though Wendi stays away from politics on her blog, she is pro-hope!
I am a writer, but fine art is my native tongue. My heart language.
I've always been an artist. I ran the art club in high school. I went to art school to get my BFA. I feel very at home in a classroom where students pick at paint under their nails while a professor asks for contemplation on the social importance of a Gordon Parks or a Cindy Sherman.
No one but the creative ideas in my head were begging me to learn photography, but I am taking a digital photography college course this semester. I enrolled and spent some scholarship money and, wow, was it weird to "go back to school."
And, wow, is it fun.
Production and commercial art have dominated my last 7 years for the sake of "making a living." I pulled out the paints and brushes every once in a while, and I took a short printmaking class at the San Antonio School of Art years ago, but I haven't dedicated this much time to truly creating art in years.
With learning photography, I feel like I'm getting a grasp on a new language, a dialect of my native tongue I appreciated and could comprehend, but couldn't write or speak myself. I haven't abandoned my old love for paints and prints, but I absolutely love that I can say what I mean with a camera in ways I can't with other mediums.
The efficiency. The veracity. The control.
I've also discovered a magic to showing up to a shoot with the intent to practice storytelling. Because you know what people do?
They tell you their stories the way they want them told.
It's a bridge. It's an in to communities often ignored or even silenced.
During critique last week, a classmate commented that she loved that I don't just make "pretty" images, but that I use my work it as a tool to say something important.
Well, yeah, art as resistance is my favorite kind of art. I don't know a better way to do it.
It explains why Banksy and Shirin Neshat and Barbara Kruger and Shepard Fairey are my art heroes. It explains why I can't experience something and be able to articulate what I feel about it until I put it down in pixels or on paper. I don't know what I think until I write or make art about it. Or lately, make an image about it.
And when I've done that, that's when I'm most sure of the purpose of this creative gift: fight oppression, seek truth, find hope.
The camera, it can be a real weapon.
Visit ShelbyMathis.com to see images from my recent series called "Crushing Walls".
Climb on,
Shelby
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