He’s a relatively new guy on the Wesleyan block, but that doesn’t devalue his worth.
Meet Andy Bloxham. Bloxham is an assistant professor of art at Wesleyan. He joined the college’s full-time faculty during the fall 2011 semester. Aside from teaching photography, he’s an avid traveler and a chameleon, if you will, who prides himself on adapting his artwork to his surroundings. He uses these adaptations to tell stories though photography.
“You know the concept of how writers go to a cabin to write and put words on paper?” Bloxham says. “They could go anywhere, but they go to a cabin. I work best by ‘going.’ The energy of traveling and going somewhere new focuses me. I have an idea for a project first, and then I morph wherever I am around that idea.”
This served as the basis for a past summer project, Shootapalooza. In 2010, Bloxham was asked to travel from Louisiana to Maine to teach a workshop. He could have taken the straightforward approach, only traveling directly to Maine, but he decided to have fun with it. In reality, he had inadvertently found the perfect excuse to travel by way of “a photographic journey.” Shootapalooza’s success led to the summer 2013 project, Shootapalooza II: The Sequel.
“I don’t like sitting still,” Bloxham says. “I have really bad wanderlust. If there’s any excuse to get up and do something, I’ll do it.”
Over the course of six weeks and 8,000 miles, Bloxham traveled across America and through Canada to make photographs in many major cities, capturing the true essence of Shootapalooza II. Like the prequel, the trip began in Louisiana, the photographer’s home state, and ran through cities such as Berkley, Portland, Vancouver, and Montreal.
Bloxham’s educational merit is further strengthened when one considers his record of accomplishment. He’s been published in PdnDU, a widely circulated magazine focusing on photographic education, and he’s been featured in Soura Magazine, the largest middle eastern photography magazine. In graduate school, he was awarded a Society for Photographic Education (SPE) National Student Award. In addition, he’s been brought in to give talks and lead workshops at more than a dozen colleges and universities across the nation, and he’s spent the last six summers as a workshop leader at the Maine Media Workshops. He’s so decorated that it might be difficult to believe that he only began studying art in graduate school. According to Bloxham, he doesn’t sleep much because “a lot of time is wasted during sleep,” but he doesn’t mind the lost hours.
“If you truly have a passion and you enjoy what you’re doing, you won’t mind putting in the hours,” he says. “Make work about rather than of. When you make work about things that you love, that you have a passion for, your work has more lasting value.”
Andy’s “Fictions” photography exhibition is on display at the University of Notre Dame from September 24 to October 19. His next solo exhibition will be in Wesleyan’s Sleeth Gallery, opening November 5, featuring work from Shootapalooza II: The Sequel.
Visit AndyBloxham.com for more photography.