Regina Mamou

Master of Fine Arts, Photography Department, '07

J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award (Jordan)

www.reginamamou.com

Experience at SAIC

At SAIC I had the benefit of working within a graduate program that supported interdisciplinary practices. My conceptual development flourished because my professors challenged me to push the boundaries of photography. With access to a wide range of equipment, I experimented with digital capabilities in photography and began to work with video installations.

SAIC also provided me with many avenues to explore in a combination of work and practical arts experience. Through the Cooperative Education Program, I pursued an internship in the Museum Education Department at The Art Institute of Chicago, and while in my first and second years of graduate school, I participated in group exhibitions at Gallery X and Gallery 2 / Project Space.

Personal statement

I Try to Erase You but You're Still Here responds to the idea of nostalgia based on location—as an origin of pain and yearning for the past. The title implies the simultaneous need to desire and dismiss juvenile experiences. The failure of trying to erase sentimental memories becomes source material for the project.

The project Making Knots begins as a response to Elaine Scarry's writing The Body in Pain, wherein Scarry identifies domestic objects that are used as instruments of pain in the private space of torture. These objects, when removed from the external world and everyday usage, are intended to inflict pain but also aid in the "unmaking of civilization [which] inevitably requires a return to and mutilation of the domestic, the ground of all making" (45).

Current Interests

My current photographic work examines the construction of memory based on location. I have always believed that the recollected past is not static but fluid and changeable like the present. As an artist I am working with this concept of fluidity of memory; as much of my work has focused on internal thoughts becoming my visual landscapes.

Background

Education: MFA, 2007, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; BFA, 2005, Rhode Island School of Design.

Exhibitions: Spoke, Chicago; Gallery 180, Chicago; Beverly Arts Center, Chicago; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago; School 33, Baltimore; Soho20 Gallery, New York; A.I.R. Gallery, New York.

Bibliography: Newcity Chicago. Publications: I'm a Heat Seeker; Hayden's Ferry Review.

Awards: J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Award (Jordan), U.S. Fulbright Critical Language Enhancement Award (Jordan).