Amy Wilton
Image courtesy of the artist.
What do the portraits that I take of women capture and reveal about what it means to become, be and be perceived as a person who identifies as a woman, and why does the process of sitting for me for a shoot so often seem to result in improved confidence and wellbeing for the sitter? How can a re-consideration of the respective potentials of American vernacular and fine art photographic portraiture to create individual and/or collective meaning problematize their perceived relative cultural values as artforms? How can the re-consideration and re-presentation of photographic images of women made by women in an installative context which explores the possibilities of photography as an ‘expanded field’ of practice (after Rosalind Krauss,1979, and George Baker, 2005), shed new light on their individual and collective meaning and significance? I want to understand what my process of making portraits of women captures and reveals about what it means to become, be and be perceived as a person who identifies as a woman, and how this process sits within the related cultural and creative contexts of American vernacular and fine art photographic portraiture? I also want to explore what can be revealed about these ways of making images by exploring more installative (or expanded) methods of creating and/or re-presenting the images of women that I create.
Amy completed a BFA in Photography from George Washington University and an MFA in Photography from Maine Media College. She has had a successful commercial, portrait, wedding and editorial photography career spanning the last 25 years. Her personal work in both photography and mixed media is based on story telling. Her photography is most often portraits, both formal and narrative. She has also worked as an editorial photographer, her work having been published in magazine and book form. Over the past 10 years Amy has directed her personal art making towards mixed media. She has created several series of work, some using graphic design, some mixed media paintings and also found object sculptures. She has completed two artist residencies and have had several solo shows where this work was the focus. Her work is usually personal in nature and explores social situations often dealing with feminism and issues of inequality.