Week 7 artists

The artist I chose to present next week is Kathy Vargas. Vargas grew up in San Antonio, Texas where a lot of her images revolved around that cultural setting. She is a photographer that has been in her field for over 30 years working primarily on hand-coloured photography. Some of the thematic ideas that we could see throughout her photographs were loss and hope, life and death, and sexuality. Her photographs are sometimes combined with embedded objects such as lace and string. The images that I find fascinating from Kathy Vargas are her images of “magic realism”. These images create a distorted message which represents her life growing up. In her image of “The Living Move (self portrait), this claims to identify the segregated world that she had been born into. Through her images, photography led her to manage a pathway to navigate and find a space for truth and meaning for her own life. This image created a sense of reality for those in the south where their lives and families have been faded and washed away due to political stance during that era. She learned a lot about the culture and how her family grew up from her parents and grandparents. But this image sets the stage for other hand coloured photographs she has talking about politics and the chicano culture.