“The fact that Sean [Perry] offered the residency to me was just amazing,” says transmedia artist Victor Josué Quintana Ramos, who this year became the first-ever artist-in-residence for the Photography + Visual Media Department at ACC. “I think it allowed me to play with all these tools, allowed me to have this collaboration with different faculty members, and then bring these things to life. This part is sort of the third series that I've created of the color photographs, but they're also part of the larger interactive spaces that I'm creating.
"I think the thing that's compelling about Victor's work is this intersection of seeing the installations, the interactivity of the audience, and then the actual physical media that he produces,” says Perry, the chair of ACC’s Photography + Visual Media Department. “I know that sounds a bit abstract, but the first piece that I had ever seen Victor do was images that were on a screen of different things in the environment with these interactive pieces in the center of the room that, as you as you played with them and moved them, they had a direct correlation to the imagery that you would see on screen. And watching how the audience would come to something like that and then began to see themselves in the environment and that sort of exchange… is very exciting and compelling. And as he's moved on to these color fields and the color work that he's doing now, it was a natural choice of sort of the intersection of art and community and the things that we try to build within the department.”
Ramos’ current exhibit, Chromacies: Opus III, is on display through the end of the year at the Atrium Gallery at ACC Highland. “It's basically the third iteration of a series of large format color abstracts,” Ramos says, “and so these are photographs that are created with a high-end phase one digital camera. You get incredible quality images; you can print them… I think they're like 40 by 53 inches. So this is basically playing around with the lights, color gels, which are very common in the photography medium – you use them to basically color backgrounds. And then I create 3D objects… and then when you combine sort of the three dimensionality of these objects with the papers of different colors, lights that are being colored, and then this huge incredible camera, you can get some really, really incredible stuff. And so it's basically getting as close as you can, so you can get almost as much of it out of focus, which is how you get some really nice defined lines at some places and then you get the blurriness coming into it as well.”
“It's been a wonderful experience for the students to see the arc and the trajectory of where he begins working through the challenges of getting what he wants and then the final installation of it,” Perry says. “The gallery is in front of the department in a large atrium space and so it's been excellent to have those color fields in that atrium. It's very pleasant to walk through, and people comment often about how it's transformed the space so it's been a delight to have his work there.”
“When we did the first soft opening, it was quite incredible because there was actually a moment there where we had invited some people that I know… some of our neighbors as well, and I didn't realize one of them actually told me that he was color blind,” Ramos recalls. “And so that struck a chord with me because a lot of the work I create through these things – and everybody has their own favorite depending on the colors and the shapes they see – but to me it's all about connection, right? It's like, how can I touch, how can I feel things that I cannot physically interact with, like light and color? And so that is a big aspect of it. So when I thought about, well, how does this experience come through to somebody who's got this physical quality that I don't have and that I can't recreate easily, right? And so to me that aspect is what gives meaning to my work, the experience that people take with them after interacting with things.”
