Meet Tamrin Ingram

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tamrin Ingram.

Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I grew up on a barren gravel road alongside the Spanish moss and the cottonmouth snakes in Northeastern Louisiana. From a community of pipeliners I spent the first several years of my life traveling quite a bit with my family as my dad worked job to job across the United States. I was raised on a steady diet of tall tales, adventure stories and country music which is probably what instilled my strong urge to get in my car and travel, something that heavily motivates me and influences my practice today.

When I was a kid my mother passed away unexpectedly and eventually my family moved to Ohio where I completed high school and then received my BFA at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio. Never quite fitting in with midwestern winters I began plotting my escape and was determined to move a little bit west and a whole lot south, which led me to Tucson, where I am pursuing my master’s degree at the University of Arizona with a focus in photography.

Please tell us about your art.
As a photographer I shoot primarily with film, usually on a large format 4×5 camera. I shoot film because I need a more tactile experience of working than digital photography can offer me. Shooting with a large format camera is so physically involving and methodical that you can’t afford to lose focus or skip a step without the whole process crumbling around you. The steps to shooting become a mantra as I work, “Aperture closed, shutter cocked, film back in, dark slide out, release the shutter and maybe, just maybe I’ve made a picture.”

My current work is heavily influenced by ideas stemming from childhood myth, exploring the ins and outs of tragedy and grief through writing, photography, and video. I’ve been creating this narrative centered around the idea of a family curse, turning real life into fiction and creating characters out of myself and family members in order to hopefully create a nuanced view of familial grief and tragedy. I’m really interested in the idea of luck, whether luck exists and whether or not it can be passed on through a family like any other hereditary trait.

Paradise is another theme that runs through my work referencing both the Garden of Eden from the Old Testament and ideas of an idyllic home and perfect upbringing. Growing up in a Southern Baptist community I’m very inspired by Biblical myth and how certain stories from the Bible still affect our world today. I’ve been working on this series of landscapes that are all captured around the border. They are color separations which is a slightly outdated way of working, but essentially, I’m shooting large format landscapes on black and white film, I shoot three negatives, the first through a red filter, then a green and then blue. I develop the three separate negatives, scan them in and then layer them on top of each other in photoshop creating a full color image. It’s a very slow process but I’m so in love with the results that I can’t quit making them. Parts of the images look normal and then parts of them are so subtly mis-registered that you can literally see the way the colors peel away and fall apart. The results are a sort of soft and imagined landscape, real but not of this world. I want the images to challenge the viewer, to question the means of representation and the notion of truth as an unfixed reality. The reality of these landscapes has been corrupted through the process of the color separation, and the landscape itself has been corrupted through the geopolitical tension of the US and Mexico. The work is still very much in progress but I’m excited to keep working through it.

As an artist, how do you define success and what quality or characteristic do you feel is essential to success as an artist?
For me success comes in a lot of different ways. If my artwork can change someone’s mind or affect the way they think or see the world then I would say it’s successful. I think I’ll also feel successful when I can get to a point where my artwork is funding itself, it sucks that money is always this nagging thought in the back of my mind but at the end of the day if I could pay my bills with money earned from being an artist then I would feel very successful.

I think in order to be successful as an artist you have to be entirely possessed by the spirit of making. It has to be the thing that drives you when you get up every morning and pushes you throughout the day. Becoming an artist isn’t all that different than becoming a movie star or a professional baseball player, it’s not an easy thing to pursue and road blocks will constantly be put in front of you and sometimes the only thing that will get you through it all us sheer will and determination.

How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
Currently the only place my work exists physically is hanging on the wall in my studio (which, if you’re in Tucson come check it out!) otherwise it’s all online. I’m always posting progress and new ideas to my Instagram (@rintamlee) and I update my website fairly often (tamriningram@gmail.com)

If you want to support my work give me a follow or get in touch! I love getting input from others. I’m also always looking for little features like this or Instagram takeovers and shootouts. Half of the battle is just finding the right channels to get your work out there in front of eyes that have never seen it before.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.tamriningram.com
• Email: tamrin.ingram@gmail.com
• Instagram: @rintamlee

Image Credit:
Tamrin Ingram

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