Tamsen Wojtanowski received her MFA in Photography from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. Her studio practice places emphasis on the materiality of the photographic medium and how it may overlap with painting, printmaking and installation. Tamsen’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Vancouver, Paris, Brisbane, and Thessaloniki. She is The Silver Eye Center for Photography’s recipient of the Keystone Award for Fellowship18, and a Fleisher Art Memorial Wind Challenge Artist. Her work has been featured in Aint-Bad, and published in the Diffusion Annual and SELFISH Magazine. Tamsen is a founding member of the artist-run exhibition space NAPOLEON, started in 2011. Presently, she is an instructor for photography for the Tyler School of Art/Temple University and Arcadia University.
birdland.
With birdland, I reflect on my time spent as an adolescent at my grandparents’ camp in the Adirondacks. Long days spent swimming and exploring the woods, long nights drawing and reading, staring into the darkness that surrounded the house. I daydreamed about what might be out there. There were the real things (the bobcats, the deer and the bears), and there were the make-believe things. The visions of peaceful giants, not really animal or human, tucked just outside of peripheral vision, who lived in harmony with one another and spent their days wandering, meddling, and loving.
In recent months, I return to these stories I used to tell myself. Birdland allows me to wander once more. Through creation I celebrate moments of discovery and play, reconnecting with experiences from my childhood. Rather than strictly printing the negatives as the camera captured them, I use handmade masks and multiple exposures in the darkroom to create images that share not only what I was seeing, but also what I was dreaming.
To view more of Tamsen Wojtanowski’s work please visit her website.