Shannon McGill Senior Portfolio: Artist-Vee Speers

Bio:

"Vee Speers was born in Australia and studied Fine Art and Photography at Queensland College of Art. Her timeless portraits have been exhibited and published world-wide and are part of many private and museum collections including the CB Collection, Tokyo, Elton John Collection, Michael Wilson Collection, George Eastman House and Clerici Collection, Italy. Vee Speers’ recent solo exhibitions were at Galerie Acte2, Paris, Jackson Fine Art and Singapore International Photography Festival."
http://www.jacksonfineart.com/Vee-Speers-3388.html#

"Her most recent work, The Birthday Party, is a series of short stories linked by the theme of an imaginary birthday party. In a conceptual and technical departure from her previous work, it is partly a self-portrait, sometimes woven with threads from her own childhood."
http://www.lostateminor.com/2010/03/26/vee-speers/

Quotes:

"Looking at these photographs, Speers strikes a chord within us to trigger our own concerns in relation to today's paranoid society. The emotive responses to her work divulge more about the viewer than the viewed." -Laura Noble

"Initially, I thought, on an obvious level, boys play with guns, even if we tell them not to. Take the gun away and they’ll get a stick. They just do that - they are impulsive. Then I started thinking about the way they might protect themselves and dress up. They fight and they play war games: Cowboys and Indians. It’s all about that kind of human nature, what we are really like and what we learn to control and kind of put away. Not violent, but I guess anarchy in some ways - individual expression, anarchy and spontaneity." -The Artist, http://www.lesphotographes.com/2010/03/06/the-parisian-life-of-vee-speers/

Since my work has taken the turn towards self-portraiture, traditional and non, looking at the work or Vee Speers makes me excited about the possibilities. She captures a look that can't be forced or faked, the look of her subjects hooks the viewer and makes them feel all of the emotions of the subject. the first quote I have included sums up a feeling I would love to achieve in my own work. I am being self reflexive with my work, but I would also like to encourage my viewer to be self-reflexive just by looking at my photos. I obviously am drawn to her technical qualities also, like her minimal color palette that removes extraneous information and allows you to feel raw emotion, and her centered minimal composition.