Pedagogy
About the author:
Sara Whittemore is a poet living in Houston, Texas. She is currently pursuing her MFA from Naropa's Jack Kerouac School and holds a Bachelor's Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Houston-Downtown where she was the recipient of The Fabian Worsham Prize in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in High Shelf Press. In addition to being a poet she considers herself an artist and enjoys photography, collage and mixed media work.
Art: Chutian Shu
In the artist's words:
Chutian Shu is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her M.F.A at Pratt Institute in 2019. She presents works in video and still photography that draw from the mundane situations of daily life to suggest both a sense of alienation from the experience of displacement and a sense of wonder over its many new possibilities. Absurd but poetic interventions in the landscape; droll, deadpan, voiceover narrations in video; and amusing Chaplinesque demonstrations of multiple ways to redeem toilet paper all suggest the different facets of a mind that is neurotically self-absorbed, endearingly naive, and bewildered by existence, all at once. In Shu's landscape photograph series, inspiration coming from the artist's growth environment. Her childhood memory is always filled with "green" that constituted by leafy forest and lawn. The figures in the photograph look like a hermit who lives in seclusion from the city on their own initiative. They take care of the plants with child-like innocence. This is the artist's escape from modern society by establishing a figure living in the natural wilderness.