NYU's Austin Irving

NYU's Austin Irving

Courtesy of the artist

Austin Irving, "Deer" (2005)

Courtesy of the artist

Austin Irving, "Rooftop 1" (2005)

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Austin Irving
Graduated from the Department of Photography and Imaging (BFA awarded May 2006)
New York University
New York, NY

Artist’s Contact:

austinirving249@yahoo.com

Artist’s Statement:

These seven images are from two separate projects: The “ShotAfterLife” series and the “Roof Top” series. While the images differ greatly in subject matter, my goals were identical for each series: to make you look harder at these photographs, to do a double take.

“ShotAfterLife” are photographs of dioramas I built of nature scenes in my apartment and inserted taxidermied animals in realistic situations. My goal was to fool my audience into thinking that they were live animals in a real place, and in many cases when the work was displayed during my BFA exhibition, the work had the desired effect.

The “Roof Top” series is an ongoing project, which stems from my obsession with the way Manhattan looks from my roof at night. Having lived in the same building my whole life, I have had a chance to see my area morph over time. In this series, I convert the massive cityscape into miniature vignettes, asking the viewer to assess if the image is a model of the city or the city itself.

Artist’s Exhibitions:

- "The Illy Show" - group show, Illy Coffee Gallery, SoHo, New York, fall 2005
- BFA “Show Two” - group show, The Gulf Western Gallery, Tisch School of the Arts, New York, February 2006
- BFA "Group Show" - lobby window, Tisch School of the Arts, New York, May-June 2006

Artist’s Awards and Honors:

- Winner of the 2006 Tobias Award
- Given the Creative Excellence Award from the Department of Photography and Imaging, May 2006
- Graduated from NYU with Honors, May 2006

About NYU’s Department of Photography and Imaging:

The Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch offers a four-year BFA program centered on the making and understanding of images. Students explore photo-based imagery as personal and cultural expression. Situated within a university, our program offers students both the intensive focus of an arts curriculum and a serious and broad grounding in the liberal arts. We are a diverse department embracing multiple perspectives, and our 130 majors work in virtually all modes of analog and digital photo-based image making and multimedia.

Our faculty and staff consist of artists, professional photographers, designers, critics, historians, and scholars offering a wide range of perspectives. Alumni from the department pursue graduate degrees, exhibit their work in galleries and museums, publish in national newspapers and magazines, work as documentarians and picture editors, produce Web sites and multimedia projects, and work in museums, educational and community settings.

The department’s facilities include two large black-and-white darkrooms, color darkrooms, digital lab, film-processing rooms, a print-finishing room, two shooting studios with professional lighting equipment, a nonsilver processing area, a gallery space, and a digital-video editing room. In addition, there is a library for the department’s print, book and slide collections.