South Central Chapter ConferenceSpeakers

Kristine Thompson

Friday, October 13, 2017 @ 11:00am, Room 158

Artist Talk: Touching Pictures

Kristine Thompson is an assistant professor of photography at Louisiana State University. She received her BS from Northwestern University and her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her work considers how contemporary photographic imagery circulates and addresses representations of death, memorial practices, and mourning. She often brings references from different time periods into a shared visual space in order to initiate a conversation between the past and the present, to imagine a tactile connection or relationship with people who are no longer around, and to question how photographs might elicit empathy.

Recent projects include Images Seen to Images Felt, an ongoing series of photograms made by pressing light-sensitive photographic paper to her laptop screen in the darkroom. They are direct impressions of digital images that she has collected from a range of online news sources. These virtual images are turned into tangible ones to facilitate a slowed-down way of considering difficult, contemporary events. She is also working on a long-term project about individuals who die with no next of kin, the government workers who handle their remains, and the often-anonymous burials of the unclaimed. She is a recipient of several grants, including a DAAD Fellowship awarded by the German government to facilitate a year-long research project and an Investing in Artists Award from the Center for Cultural Innovation. Her artwork has recently been exhibited at Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California; the Colorado Photographic Art Center; and School 33 in Baltimore. Thompson served for several years as a curator at UCR/California Museum of Photography, and she continues to initiate curatorial projects.