Amy Stein

First off, I just want to say that the Amy Stein lecture was my favorite out of all of the lectures I've seen this year. Paul Shambroom is a close second. I really like the ideas behind her work. Her series, Stranded, was one of my favorites. I love the idea of just driving anywhere, with no destination in mind. You don't know when you're going to find your next subject. And then you see someone, so you stop, not knowing if you're going to get a picture or not. I think the whole idea is really exciting because you have no idea what kind of people you're going to run into. I think her pictures really capture her subjects and their emotions well. Her pictures are often funny but they're also tinged with something else. And it's something I can't really describe. It's just an emotion that I felt when I looked at them, I'm not sure if anyone felt that way. Her project is something that I wish I could do now but being a student I feel like I don't have time to do anything much less take a cross-country road trip. I think her Domesticated series was really well done too. I think it's so funny that all we ever talk about is how we want to be more connected to nature. People spend millions of dollars on private homes tucked away into the mountainsides and then flip out when animals come close to their property. Before you were there, animals were there and it is in their nature to explore the area around them. We want to be close to nature and then when we have it, we're scared and we want it to go away. It's a really fine line and I think the artist captured that well in her series. Like I said before, Amy Stein was my favorite of all the artist lectures I went to. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the future.