Willowtail Springs Nature Preserve Artist Residency Proposal

Roxie Mitchell
I am excited about the possibility of doing an artist residency at Willowtail Springs Nature Preserve in
the coming year. I am a practicing visual artist and I am currently the Photography Teacher in the
Visual Arts Department at Durango High School in Durango, Colorado. I have taught in this position
for the last 8 years and I have been recently been awarded a sabbatical leave for the 2015-2016 school
year to pursue art making, research and education in the digital arts in order to deepen the experience I
provide to students in my classroom when I return the following year; I am proposing to do a body of
work at Willowtail Springs as part of the sabbatical work.
I work in the genre of experimental photography. I have a specific interest in subject matter that
combines Nature and graphic elements. Many of my pieces explore the possibilities of combing photos
with other materials for finishing and displaying. I have included current work to give you examples of
the type of imagery I produce using a camera and Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom. Beyond what
I am showing you here, I take the imagery and experiment with combing materials and finishing to
create a final piece. For example, in the slide titled, RMitchell_1 of Engineer Mountain, I printed this
photo on matte paper and mounted it on a 8 stack of congregated cardboard. For the slide titled
RMitchell_3 of the bike species graphic, I printed this photo on clear acetate and layered it over
hand-marbled paper. Further, in the slide titled RMitchell_2 of trail and cloud, I printed this photo on
glossy paper, mounted it on a wood block and covered it in clear acrylic.
The work I propose to create while in residence at Willowtail Springs will continue with combining
Nature and graphic elements in new ways; I am specifically interested in Willowtail Springs because I
will be able to capture new images of the natural world to include in my work. Along with this, my
work will be focused in a new direction which is experimenting with combining electronics and
computer programming with still images. For example, my printed photograph might be combined with
LED lights that shine through points in the image and are controlled by a Arduino programmable
sensor that changes the lights based on different conditions, such as the viewer's movement. For
another example, I am taking a course at Anderson Ranch in August of 2015 to learn about using
Arduino sensors to capture data from environments and turn them into graphic images such as line
graphs. For this I might then combine the images of the data I collect, from say the sounds of birds in
an area at Willowtail Springs, and overlay these graphics with photographic images of the same area.
This is an additional reason I am specifically interested in the residency at Willowtail Springs: for the
quiet, focused time to listen to the natural environment that is necessary to produce such experiments.
The work of combining electronics and computer programming with still images will create a body of
work over the course of my sabbatical which will culminate in a show somewhere in the Durango area
in the late Spring of 2016 and be the basis for new course curriculum and instruction at Durango High
School that works to create more opportunities for students in STEM (Science, Technology,
Engineering and Math) in the visual arts classroom. While in residence at Willowtail Springs, I expect
to create a series of 3-5 finished experimental images that would be included in this final show of my
sabbatical work.