Travis Lovell, courtesy the artist.
Travis Lovell is an associate professor of photography at Utah Valley University who specializes in the history of the medium including various historic and traditional methods of photography. Much of his work is centered around the landscape and the unspoken stories and concerns of overlooked or minimized areas, but he admits that recently his personal work has taken a back seat to a project he is involved in as a professor.
The program was begun in 2015 with Howard Fullmer, associate professor of illustration, that now includes Brandon Truscott, associate professor of graphic design. “We collaborate with students on a centralized theme around which we can create art. These projects involve immense amounts of research, travel, and exploration and upon returning from the travels graphic design students, working with faculty, create a fine art coffee table book that we then publish. It provides an opportunity for students to have more of an apprenticeship experience rather than the traditional classroom interactions to master their art. It also provides me with an opportunity to challenge myself to create in new ways and around ideas that I normally wouldn’t while helping students to do the same.”
Last year the professors and students traveled from New Orleans to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, documenting aspects of the Civil War and the subsequent fight for Civil Rights. Dividing Colors | War and Rights will be finished printing in a couple months, and an exhibit of some of the images from the project will be on display in the Noorda Center for the Performing Arts at Utah Valley University in March. In May they will be traveling with 18 art students to Germany to explore the collected fairy and folk tales of the Brothers Grimm with the goal of publication in the summer of 2020.
“These projects require so much research and exploration that they end up becoming one of my primary creative outlets each year. I will also be starting a series of limited edition platinum/palladium prints of personal work. There is an exhibit at the Hope Gallery in Salt Lake from last December that has been extended into this year that contains images that will be the starting point for this new offering.”
For more information: www.travislovell.com
Photograph by Travis Lovell of a Civil War reenactment to be included in the book Dividing Colors | War and Rights.
What’s New (2019) curated by Emily Larsen.
Every January we check in with Utah artists to see what the new year holds in store for them.
Categories: Visual Arts | What's New
