Senior art major to showcase photos from summer in New York
The Juanita & Ralph Harvey School of Visual Arts will hold an opening for Kerri Dawn Carter, senior in art, on March 8 from 6-8 p.m. in the Juanita Harvey Art Gallery Foyer. The exhibit will run until April 19.
The exhibition will be Carter’s first solo exhibition on campus. Carter said that the biggest challenge was getting all of her prints finished on time.
“I am student teaching, so I’ve been pretty busy,” she said. “Without the help of Catherine Prose, Jennifer Yucus, Carlos Aleman and Sydney Kuehler, it would have been difficult to get everything finished.”
Carter will present photographs taken during her 2011 Summer Residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
“My time in New York was spent walking the streets and usually making my way to one of the green spaces in the city,” Carter said. “Most days consisted of me taking the subway to a random stop close to Central Park and exploring.”
Carter’s interest in photography started in 2008 after her father passed away from brain cancer.
“I realized how important an image can be,” she said. “I have always drawn and enjoyed art, but I did not realize that this was what I wanted to do with my life until my dad’s death. The only thing that got me through that time was drawing portraits every night.”
Carter said her exhibition was inspired by street photograph, and it has three main focuses. The first is photos of people in Central Park sunbathing, which Carter said she found interesting because the residents of New York do not have backyards.
“I find the people in the city so fascinating,” Carter said. “They live such different lives than we do here in Texas. Everything we do in our backyards, (New Yorkers) do in the parks.”
The second focus of her exhibition is from an event on Governor’s Island called “Punk Island,” which consisted of live punk music. To take these photos, Carter had to get in the middle of a mosh pit. The third and final focus was a play performed on Governor’s Island during an annual art festival held there.
According to Carter, the biggest difference she faced shooting in New York compared to Texas was the openness of the residents.
“They literally wear their weirdness out in the open,” she said. “They are also used to cameras being everywhere, so I could just blend into the crowd. We are more conservative in Wichita. If I were to go to Wal-Mart and start taking pictures of people in the parking lot, they would be freaked out and I would probably get arrested.”
During her residency, Carter was able to meet with and be critiqued by four professors, as well as Jerry Saltz, a well-known art critic who has worked for New York Magazine, and Vince Aletti, a well-known music journalist and photography critic who has worked for Village Voice and Rolling Stone Magazine.
Carter said she learned a lot from the professors and special guests, and they helped improve her photography.
“(Aletti’s) critique of my work was that I worked great with color, and that my Punk Island photos were some of the best musical photography he has seen.”
Of all the photographs presented, Carter said her two favorite pieces were “Yellow Speedo,” an image of an overweight, older man taking a cat nap in the park with his clothes scattered all around him, and “Hard Driving Rock and Roll,” an image from Punk Island of a young man in a mosh pit.
“I usually only get one shot at my photographs because people are constantly moving and not posed,” Carter said. “I have to be completely aware of my surroundings and pay close attention to things in the distance to get my composition prepared.”
Carter plans to graduate in May. After her time in college is finished, Carter said she hopes to look into volunteer programs that would allow her to travel around the world and document volunteer efforts through photography.
“One of the programs I am really interested in is on an old naval ship that sails to Indonesia to open clinics,” Carter said. “I am also looking into backpacking across Europe, doing residencies for photography all over the world and becoming an art teacher in Europe. My dream job would be living in London and being a photographer for National Geographic.”