Art Talk Statement:
Interested in making a creative leap? Feeling a bit stuck after almost a year at home? Please join us for a talk on jump-starting your creativity with Ann Mitchell, a photographer and educator. Using examples from her own creative journey, Ann will talk about her start as a studio food and product photographer and then how she transitioned into fine art landscape/architecture and then finally into photomontage. She will include issues related to the differences between commercial and fine art, as well as some creativity tools and tips.
Bio:
Ann Mitchell is a Southern California-based artist and educator who uses photography to explore our sense of place, actively engaged in creating worlds of poetic experience. She received a BFA in Photography from Art Center College of Design and worked as an award-winning advertising and editorial photographer for over a decade. Wanting to commit to her own artistic practice, she returned to Claremont Graduate University and completed her MFA in 1997. During her time at CGU, in addition to producing her own work, she discovered her love of organizing and community while curating several large group exhibitions and has continued that commitment through the organizing of photo-related events. After graduation she joined the Art Department at Long Beach City College, where she taught for over two decades, hosted multiple visual media festivals, served as Chair and as Digital Media Program Coordinator.
Her photographs have been included in a large number of solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally and have been featured in numerous publications. In 2008 Balcony Press released Austin Val Verde: Impressions of a Montecito Masterpiece, a monograph of her Val Verde project. She continues to teach workshops and pursue her photographic interests in her most recent work The Chance Chronicles, a photomontage series of platinum palladium dreamscapes.
On Photography:
Ann Mitchell’s mother is a painter and her father was a film-maker. Over time, she’s come to realize that her photography…and her thoughts about the medium in general has been deeply influenced by both those artists. She’s always seen photography as an expressive medium that plays with the “real” but is not bound by it. She wants to create images that people can get lost in, that give the essence of a time or place in a way that speaks to the heart.