Ivette Spradlin, Shuanna with Child, Braddock PA, inkjet print, Everything Changes, Then Changed Again at Center for Emerging Visual Artists

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists has had artist exchange exhibits with the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts for the past five years.  The current show which ends April 20th is Ivette Spradlin‘s Everything Changes, Then Changed Again, is an exhibit of large scape black and white “portraits”.  Ivette Spradlin has ties to Philadelphia because she went to grad school and taught here at Tyler School of Art, graduating in 2007 after which she briefly moved back to Atlanta then on to Pittsburgh. When she began working there Ivette realized she needed to build a community of friends and figure out a way to meet people. Her photography project came about from the need and desire to connect to people and wasn’t originally intended to be shown but more of a way to get access to people.  The collection was first shown at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, CFEVA is the second venue for the collection. 

“I wanted to start shooting portraits again so I started asking a couple of people that I knew there and it kind of built up from there.   I would meet people and ask if I could take their portrait and I would have them choose a space and location and let them know that I was looking for a space in transition.   Some of these people are in some sort of transition in their own life and I felt I was, so, this was a way of documenting that transition for me and for them.  And getting to know Pittsburgh.”

Ivette Spradlin at Center for Emerging Visual Artists 

The Center for Emerging Visual Artists has had artist exchange exhibits with the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts for the past five years.  The current show which ends April 20th is Ivette Spradlin‘s Everything Changes, Then Changed Again, is an exhibit of large scape black and white “portraits”.  Ivette Spradlin has ties to Philadelphia because she went to grad school and taught here at Tyler School of Art, graduating in 2007 after which she briefly moved back to Atlanta then on to Pittsburgh. When she began working there Ivette realized she needed to build a community of friends and figure out a way to meet people. Her photography project came about from the need and desire to connect to people and wasn’t originally intended to be shown but more of a way to get access to people.  The collection was first shown at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, CFEVA is the second venue for the collection.

Ivette Spradlin, Heather in Marchester, Pittsburgh PA, inkjet print, 42″ x 52″

“I think that those ideas about adapting are always in my head  and that’s definitely what this work was for me, adapting to Pittsburgh and learning to be a person there, an artist there, a teacher there, a friend.   When I first started it, I really wanted the figure to be really small and encompassed in a landscape, part of that is a visual thing but Pittsburgh’s landscape it can kind of tower over you, there are a lot of mountains, and I wanted it to feel like you’re enveloped in the landscape, almost a little bit lost in it.   Then some of the turns (of the subject) we came up with are kind of an optimism, a hope, like the turn of a transition, like their life was looking towards something else.  Some of them are getting divorced, some of them are having babies, so I think that had a lot to do with that.”  Most of Ivette Spradlin’s portraits were collaborations with her subjects as far as setting and wardrobe but sometimes she would be led to a certain spot and learn some of the subject’s personal history.   “We shot in many locations for each person and that’s the part where the photographer makes the decisions, like where you’re going to photograph them?  And where they’d look good, what’s nice aesthetically.”

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer 

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Recommended reading from Ivette Spradlin