Dear reader,

I am currently seeking a masters in New Arts Journalism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where I also received my B.F.A.

I am also an editor and the designer of The Platypus Review.

I lecture on Art History to University of Chicago Lab School students in an A.P. European history course.

email: laurie.rojas@gmail.com

For the curious ones: a little more personal background

During my undergraduate education, I mostly focused on photography and art history. When I first arrived at SAIC in January 2004, I thought I could use design as a means for political agitation. A dream that quickly faded into a desire to make conceptual -perhaps more challenging- aesthetic objects through photography and video. I owe this to SAIC’s art history courses. This work flirted with ideas of “gender troubles” but mostly became a vehicle for therapy -very common in undergraduate work today- in a moment where my idea of “self” was changing or atleast a moment where I was going through a significant transformation, and didn’t know how to cope with it. The few last objects-de-art that I made became increasing self-referential, still personal (as if art today is anything but personal) and in many ways nostalgic about photography (as if I already knew that my days as an artist were counted).

I was born and raised in Panama and in September 2001, when I was nineteen, I came to the U.S.  to go to college. I transferred out of schools two times, and changed majors about 4 times total. The last six years of my life have been a battle between what I was (and the life I had in Panama) and what I wanted to be (and the life I wanted).  I chose to leave behind a life of comfort and complacency, for one of personal struggle and political uncertainty. But, I have gained a new life for myself, one that I could have never imagined six years ago, and I feel empowered because of it. I have gone against the grain of the expectations of my family and my old friends, I sometimes fear, however, that I’ve become almost unrecognizable to anybody who knew me before I was twenty.

This blog will rarely contain personal anecdotes beyond this page because it seeks to archive and record the further transformation and development of ideas (as opposed to that of an individual). In the end The Personal is Not Political (title of a forthcoming essay on art and politics).

-Laurie Rojas, December 2008