Natia Ser
2024 Aurora Project Residency
2024 Aurora Project Resident Natia Ser was born in Hong Kong and has lived in the US for five years. Ser explores signs of intimacy that exist in temporal itinerant living through artist books, photo installations, and paper sculptures, investigating the ambivalence of familiarity and estrangement, longing, and belonging. Ser incorporates bodies of water into her work, and she’s excited about exploring Pogue’s Run, Bean Creek, and the White River during her residency. Her research in Indianapolis will contribute new photographs and writings for an artist book commingling with an archive of water images and poems, to be printed on papers handmade using abaca and lake water.
About her work, Ser writes:
My photographs seldom exist simply as framed prints on walls but tangible objects meant to be held, with ease, in the palms of the viewer, or clasped, delicately, between their fingertips. Hence, I incorporate my photographs with unconventional materials and diverse forms of book arts that allow for a private, intimate exchange between my audience and myself. By inviting the audience to touch the same surfaces of an object that I previously handmade and/or handbound with care, we engage in a tender dialogue that transcends time and space. This interaction contributes to the recurring motif of tactility in my practice — whether as a subject, printing material, or the object that I commingle my images with. It is informed by a playfulness and curiosity associated with the childishness that I was barred from during my strict Chinese upbringing, which I now challenge. It also signals the intimacy and tenderness that I hope to offer and desire, yet fear, from a distant, departed home representing both affection and restriction, and a foreign land and its people from which I am bound to part due to a student visa that will inevitably expire. In fact, the often compact nature of book arts would make them transportable objects suitable for my itinerant living style.
Natia Ser is a photo-based artist currently working in Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at Affordable Art Fair (Hong Kong), Filter Photo, Gene Siskel Film Center, SITE Galleries, and Awagami International Mini-Print Exhibition (Tokushima, Japan), with some collected by John M. Flaxman Library. Ser completed her BFA with a concentration in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was awarded the Presidential Merit Scholarship, Fred Endsley Memorial Fellowship, and Graduating Student Leadership Award. She is also a recipient of the Luminarts Visual Arts Fellowship (Finalist), LeiRoy Neiman Fellowship, Sovereign Art Foundation Students Prize, and Award for Excellence in Illinois College Newspapers (1st Place Feature Photo and 2nd Place Photo Essay). She is currently the Collections & Archives Fellow at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago.
The Aurora Project Residency offers a two-week intensive work period for experimentation, research, and development of new or ongoing projects, with priority for the residency given to projects that engage and incorporate the place and people of Indianapolis.
The Aurora Project Residency would not be possible without the following partnership.
Pending scheduling, Tube Factory Artspace will donate lodging for this residency in their artist bed and breakfast located on Cruft Street in the Garfield Park area of Indianapolis. Aurora PhotoCenter thanks Tube Factory Artspace for its generous support of this residency.
