Fall ‘07 HHS Winner: Ross Sawyers
Untitled (One) by Ross Sawyers
Ross Sawyers
Currently residing in Seattle, Washington
Website
www.rossawyers.com
Work Statement
The spaces in my photographs are influenced by living in increasingly smaller spaces in closer proximity to others in increasingly dense neighborhoods and housing developments of a city like Seattle. I construct the situations I photograph as a way to challenge my understanding of the buildings and neighborhoods I am referencing. Building, then photographing models allows me to exaggerate and over-state what I observe in my surroundings rather than simply replicating it. The environments depicted in my photographs are close to the actual, but deliberately are not accurate copies of reality.
Recently my intentions have shifted from representing specific received ideas to the exploration of why I am so attracted to these types of environments. As the spaces I create and mediate get further away from the reality I know, I have found it increasingly important to incorporate details familiar to us as humans in living spaces in order to ground the images in a sort of reality while at the same proposing situations outside the expected.
Bio
Born in 1979, Ross Sawyers moved from Iowa to Kansas City Missouri in 1998 to study photography at the Kansas City Art Institute. He received his B.F.A. from KCAI in 2002 and an M.F.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2007. Sawyers was recently chosen by the Art in Loop Foundation in Kansas City to be the inaugural artist for the semi-annual commission ArtWall. Concurrent with the unveiling of ArtWall, he was invited back to the Kansas City Art Institute in November of 2006 as a visiting artist. In March of this year Ross was invited to present his art work at the Society for Photographic Education national conference “Look Out� in Miami Florida where he was also presented with the Crystal Apple Award. Sawyers’ work is part of the Belger Family Foundation Collection in Kansas City, the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection and the King County Portable Works Collection, both in Seattle. He was selected for the 2006 CoCA Annual His work was seen in his recent solo show at Platform Gallery in Seattle in July and looks forward to a solo exhibition at Gallery 4Culture in January.
