Past: ‘Don’t Take Pictures’ Featured in Catapult’s Artist of the Month Exhibit

“Don’t Take Pictures” is this year’s third Student Artist of the Month exhibit at Southeast Missouri State University’s Catapult Creative House.

The exhibition, currently on display on the second floor of Catapult, features the work of Southeast students pursuing degrees in commercial photography. The exhibition will remain on display through October, with a closing reception scheduled for 5-9 p.m. Nov. 1. Catapult Creative House is located at 612 Broadway in downtown Cape Girardeau.

Photographic history is riddled with an obsession of details providing evidence of the “real.”  The now prolific act of taking pictures seduces the everyday image taker into the wild, so life can be romantically documented. Through this hyper documentation by citizen-photographers with smartphones and thousands of social media followers, the familiar becomes unavoidable.

Confronting a straight aesthetic, the imagery behind this exhibition voices how the boundaries of photographic content can encompass, personalize and depict the subject to unlock a new photographic philosophy. Giving life to images after the moment of exposure, these artists with cameras don’t take pictures, they make them.

As a part of a program to promote community-based and integrated art making, student artists are chosen to exhibit their work at Catapult Creative House’s Student Studio Gallery. These exhibitions showcase a range of work from individual artists that highlights their personal and professional artistic explorations as a part of the southeast Missouri art community. These artists explore the physicality of the human condition, its relationship to nature and the role of art in contemporary society. In addition to the exhibition, attendees are welcome to tour the studio spaces, view ongoing projects and engage with the artists.