Colleen Choquette-Raphael / La La (installation view) / Visual Symbiosis / CMU Art Center / Buffalo Bridge Gallery (2016)
Colleen Choquette-Raphael / La La #2 #3 #4 / Visual Symbiosis / CMU Art Center / Buffalo Bridge Gallery (2016) / Visual Symbiosis Exhibition (2020) / courtesy of the artist
Colleen Choquette-Raphael / La La #1 / Visual Symbiosis / CMU Art Center / Buffalo Bridge Gallery (2016) / Visual Symbiosis Exhibition (2020) / courtesy of the artist
About the artist : Colleen Choquette-Raphael received her MFA in Art with an emphasis in photography and intermedia from the University of Washington and holds a BA in Art History and Art Education and a BFA in Visual Design from the University of Oregon. Since joining the faculty in 1998 she has taught a broad constellation of courses in photographic media; including film and darkroom photography, large format and the constructed image. She has also offered courses in foundations, theory seminars on the body and the abject, public art, a workshop on experimental book structures and intermedia courses on art and the found object. Deeply influenced by film studies and feminist literature, Choquette-Raphael's creative practice combines photographic images, medical specimens, video, performance, text and curatorial work to map the hallucinatory space between gender-biased binaries of thought. - Using cultural artifacts that are aligned with stereotypical notions of femininity, she summons the unstable point when a sign becomes its antithesis; where equilibrium slips into delirium, science becomes sentiment, and the flower in the garden pornographic. The objects exist in a state of perpetual deterioration; a child’s toy reveals itself to be a discarded emblem of gender performance, scientific diagrams are inscribed in melting beeswax and a series of constructed images mythologize the suicide of female poets. Her work as an animal welfare advocate has spawned a current project exploring political puppet theatre. - Choquette-Raphael is also the primary academic advisor for the Department of Art and teaches study abroad courses in Italy and Greece.