Teresa Meier graduated from AAU with an MFA and now is teaching classes of her own. This fall, you can join Teresa at "Making Meaningful Photographs," Sept 14-15 in the nature reserve at Sitka Center. She says she has a couple of spots left!
On October 21st she is giving an artist talk at SPENW in Corvallis, OR entitled "Image Maker: The Artist Within."
Below you can see some of her work from The Witness Within.
“You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between a truth and a human being is a story.” ~ Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom
In the words of Frida Kahlo, these images are the most honest expression of myself that I can show you. They represent all the things that I saw, all that I witnessed and experienced, disassembled, an-alyzed, and meticulously rebuilt into my own personal mythology. I sought out landscapes I’d ven-tured through, mimicked the unnerving symmetry of the suburban neighborhoods from my child-hood, remembered my constant cat companion, and realized that vivid pink skies will always signify home to me. I carried around a box of family photos that as a child I had spent hours poring over, trying to make all the pieces of family fit together into some kind of whole. I thought about the reli-gion and father that damned me before I was born. I packed it all up, carried it with me, and let each place tell a piece of the story as I came to know it—slowly, in bits and pieces, out of time, and from many different points of view.
This series continues to be a cathartic journey of self-exploration and identity, investigating and de-ciphering place and personal history, and its effect on my visual style as an artist. Aesthetically, the work is inspired by magical realism, the universally understood characteristics of fairytales, as well as my own personal history. Narratively, it is influenced by the classic hero-quest literary structure. The final images are presented quite large at 48”x72” due to my penchant for detail, and are con-structed with a super computer named, Thor. As I continue to work on the series, I have begun to reconstruct my childhood family home from memory, both digitally and in reality, adding yet an-other layer of intrigue into how we construct fact and use it to navigate the world.
See the completed body of work at: https://www.teresameier.com/