Standing in Great Salt Lake, UT

 

BIO

Megan Riley is a graphic designer and photographer based in Hingham, MA. She holds a BA in Fine Art, with a minor in Art History, and an MS in Communication Design. With over 20 years as a graphic designer in the magazine industry in New York, the financial sector in Boston, and with her husband ran their own web design company, she also spent 11 years as a Creative Director at the New England Aquarium before turning her attention to lens-based media, while dabbling in silk screening fabric and tree ring printmaking. She currently focuses on photography and digital media as a fine art practice. She observes the world around her, using photography as a documentation tool and then experimenting with digital media to see how she can transform images to discover what will happen next, allowing image “ingredients” to tell their own story. Her work is about the experience and the process of making. It is also about starting with a kernel of an idea, then setting up mini-environments and allowing the unexpected to happen. She begins with gathering and arranging everyday items into still life stories that reveal themselves through the process of placing, rearranging and recording. 

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 STATEMENT

There is beauty and intrigue in everyday objects, even those that some might find grotesque or morbid. There is beauty in life, and in decay. I gather what’s around me, including flowers, dishes, fabric, miscellaneous collections I am working on, skulls and bones, and roadkill found by the side of the road. The digital process allows me to push boundaries of what's real and what's abstract. The process is where the magic happens. Never sure where things will end up, I manipulate and play with techniques, deconstructing and layering. Ordinary objects become something more, something other. The result is the surprise of the unexpected and the serendipitous.

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She can be reached at meganriley@gmail.com