Rochelle Woldorsky

 

Approach to mentoring:

I have been an art instructor for over 20 years and during that time I worked with many students on senior projects and graduate reviews.  For the past four years I have mentored graduate students at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design.  I have enjoyed these experiences very much and feel very fortunate to work one on one with an student/artist at the beginning or midwayin their career or studies.

As a working artist I am aware of the multiple injections of information that are tossed out, sometimes well meaning and sometimes off hand.  This information can be confusing but also exhilarating.  My job as a mentor is to assist the mentee in sorting through and finding what is relevant to their work.   There will be changes in the work and the working process. Guiding the student/artist toward a personal  vision and voice, I encourage exploration and challenge them to bring new  directions, materials, and content into their work.

There are many things that need to be addressed that often are not just in the studio.

Writing statements that define the work and working process is necessary to connect with the world such as in applying for jobs, grants, shows, and being able to articulate and speak about their specific approach.  This is a practice that I continue to emphasis when critiquing and discussing the progress of the work.

My experience as an artist having shown my work in many venues and as a curator  who has put together works of other artists, as a panelist and juror, I can be very helpful to the mentee in structuring and arranging works for exhibition and critique.

I am always in their corner, there to assist in technical, directional, and in any way that helps to attain goals both short term and long term.

Artist Statement

My artwork has always been influenced by my surroundings. Those influences go back and forth in time and include rooms that I’ve inhabited, travels and cities that I’ve lived in and visited, stretches of countryside that I’ve passed through from one place to another, moments that crop up and images that stay in my mind.

I am not dedicated to one particular style or method of creating artworks.  I was a painter for many years and focused on still lives infused with light and shadows.  I moved onto pastels of houses, mainly houses in my neighborhood.  I went back to graduate school to work on a series of lithographs and instead became fascinated by computer and all that the computer images allowed.  I spend several years on a project documenting and creating works based on transitional land development from farm to suburb.  This included installation, video, interviews, papermaking, printmaking. Another series of works concentrated on notes and images of the Hudson River, mainly snapshots taken from a moving train.  These images were reworked in Photoshop and assembled as wall installations.

When one has had a long career in art some subjects disappear and reappear.  I have lately picked up on the house theme. Photographing abandoned and boarded houses.

A concern of mine is the transitional landscape.  The changing world, the building and tearing down of structures, the disruption of useable land for development. Often images of older structures and construction zones.  While these images can be somewhat depressing I am always looking for the aesthetic within shifting landscapes/cityscapes.

I use the camera to gather images but that is not where the process ends.  Depending on the subject if it is a landscape such as the Hudson River Series I would want to experience a larger sense of space, moving along as one does on a river.  With this new series of boarded  houses I keep going back and finding further deterioration or in some instances the houses completely gone.  The empty lots retain the image of the house mainly because I photographed it.  If I hadn’t photographed it may simply be an empty lot.  There is a sense of past and present, perhaps waiting for the future.