Background

I finished the last three years of high school at Lincoln High School, and subsequently spent four and a half years at University of the Pacific, both in Stockton, California. Stockton is a fairly quiet community in terms of culture. It has an Asparagus Festival, where a host of strange asparagus-related foods ranging from fried asparagus to asparagus ice-cream are served amongst a collection of carnival-style activities. Stockton has a few galleries speckled here and there that usually display watercolors, oils, and other things I find myself marginally interested in. Some of those paintings are beautiful, but so traditional I find it hard to relate to them.

I can remember feeling that way for a long time. I have a very strong background in drawing and illustration which I use occasionally, but I always felt like I was interested in exploring all art, and would like to have had a massive palette of skills to choose from when it came to making things. As a result, Stockton’s art scene was pretty dead to me.

Going to a university was not exactly the plan either, I needed some serious coaxing from my parents. I was pretty burnt out after the horror that is high school, and also really wanted to go to film school despite the fact that my experience to that point was editing a couple of horrific analog videos. UOP was the only place I got accepted to, but it turned out to be a good deal. My mother teaches there so I paid only ten percent of the total tuition.

I started as a graphic design major, which I quickly realized was the opposite of what I wanted to do. I eventually switched to getting a BFA in Studio Arts, and thankfully the university did not require students to focus (which seems like an unnecessary stifling of one’s options). I took a sculpture class with Trent Burkett, an incredible artist and teacher, who’s still a good friend of mine. He had a lot of ideas about art and its process that still ring true for me true today, and often find myself considering what he might ask of a project I’m working on. Amy Todd is another professor who taught at UOP for a short time, but had a major influence on my work and process. She no longer teaches there, but I am also still in touch with her. I took as many classes as I could from the two of them, and gained alot from that experience. They had great insights on how to critique work, how to analyze process, how to ask questions of yourself, and many other little tidbits of advice with regard to the creative process. Many of the things I learned from them have carried me through grad school. They were huge influence on my decision to go to grad school at the University of Minnesota, which is where Trent received his MFA in ceramics. I, however, was interested in being able to experiment with multiple media, and as a result applied for the new Time and Interactivity MFA at the U of M.

The program has many different names depending on what university you go to: New Media, New Genres, Integrated Media, etc. They also take on different forms, but are essentially similar in that these programs are searching for the newest ways in which artists work, and trying to stabilize and teach them. The ambiguity of such a program drew me, because I saw freedom within the lack of definition. So far I’ve been pretty free to move through the departments, and taken a good range of classes. For now, I’ll end this review here, and let the rest develop on its own.