Strengthening Your Artistic Voice
In this course, we’ll develop methods to deepen the meaning in your work and to communicate it more clearly to others. We’ll consider a series of questions — both pre- and post-image creation — about how you can expand the richness of your photography. Some of the methods we’ll use will be practicing analyzing your own and other’s work; identifying shared themes and motifs; and discussing how we can further flesh out those aspects in your next picture-taking session.
We’ll explore techniques to clarify your personal voice and develop conceptual depth in order to create or expand your body of work. This class is geared toward students who want to expand their skills in analysis in a low-pressure, fun atmosphere, and relate that to their own photography. Students will create new work each week and receive personal and group feedback on what they create. This class will include virtual studio visits and will also be useful to develop language required for portfolio reviews, grants, residencies, and project proposals.
Duff Norris is a Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer working in performance and visual art, currently focusing on photography and performance-for-documentation, using the mythos of objects and iconography within his work. His experience growing up in the American West has informed his aesthetics, evidenced in projects like RH Desert, and Freshly Wedded Queer. More broadly, his practice centers on themes of intimacy, masculinity, and direct address audienceship. Using personal narrative and portraiture as an entry point, he is interested in how impenetrable or porous boundaries are between an artists and audience. He asks questions about what narratives we are telling ourselves, what our relationship is to each other are, and if it is possible to be known and understood.
He has exhibited work with Culture Lab LIC (Queens), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn), La Mama Galleria (Manhattan), On Canal (Manhattan), Experimental Sound Studio & Out of Site Chicago, Save Art Space (Los Angles), Tijuana Performa-Mexico, Walters Art Museum (Baltimore), and in Lake Ballard (Menzies, Australia). He completed an MFA from Pratt Institute and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Duff teaches strengthening your artistic voice for StrudelmediaLive.