filter01, screenprint
My path to Highpoint began somewhat unconventionally, with my graduation from Perpich Arts High School in the spring of 2015. Rather than attend college right out of the gate, I decided to take a year off to give myself the opportunity to try something outside of the traditional educational setting, and to better inform what I would do with my eventual college experience. I spent the year working at the Walker Art Center and interning in their education department, and a coworkers mention of Highpoint’s internship program led me to working as an education intern from the fall of 2015 to the spring of 2016. I had the opportunity not only to work with an amazing and diverse array of students, but was also afforded access to Highpoint’s co-op studio.
My work arises out of questions and a need for exploration. I feel a need to constantly reevaluate my perspectives, impulses and conventions, and I like a degree of uncertainty in my work. I find myself drawn to screenprinting for both its malleability as a medium and for the inspiration found incidentally through the process. I recycle and appropriate marks, gestures and actions, manipulating them both physically and digitally in order to create my imagery. Working consistently with a process-based medium has taught me to keep a close and inquisitive eye on things that may initially seem unremarkable or commonplace.
Being that I have not had a “formal/college” arts education, access to the studios at Highpoint was (and is) an incredibly exciting privilege and opportunity to push myself as an artist over the past year. Very few people my age have access to the sort of facilities and community I have found here. Come fall I will be starting at MCAD with plans to pursue their studio fine arts or printmaking major as well as their teaching artist minor program. Though this will mark the end of my time at Highpoint (at least for now), I can safely say that working and creating here has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life thus far.
