Alumni Highlight...

Christie Blizard, a 2005 GSU alum, has since joined Texas Tech University as an Assistant Professor of Painting and Painting Coordinator. In the past year, Blizard has participated in several exhibitions and festivals including the Texas Biennial, Southwest Biennial, International Film Competition held in Cincinnati, OH in 2008 and the Berkeley Art Center’s International Film Festival.

Blizard's Artist Statement: 

Compelled with ideas of reverb, compression, and information-loops, I reconfigure my work into new forms and media. I am interested in the fusion of high and low technology, and disparate aesthetics, including pixels, early video games, Dutch painting, Non-objective Abstraction, and Navajo rug designs. In a recent project for example, I incorporated still images of drawings, paintings, installations and previous animations into a new video that I photographed while it looped on my computer. The open aperture of my camera and reeling stills of the video created hybrid images that became the foundation for a series of paintings.  One of these paintings in turn became the beginning of an animation entitled Skepticism that has turned into a large photo collage of all the stills, and I intend for this new matrix to be the beginning of a new painting. This intersection of systems and chance operations captures the spaces between images, emphasizing that each piece is part of a larger and continuous whole.  This can be compared to a transition from a major chord to a minor one, and I view this as being similar to John Cage.

For more information and recent work, check out the artist's website: www.christieblizard.com