Desi Rhodes

BFA in Photography

Desirae Rhodes is an artist who mainly works with photography. Rhodes often creates works using creative play, but these are never limited to what she can accomplish. Play is a serious matter, and she chooses not to apply rules within her works of art. Her photos represent a mysterious and crowded emotion. At times, the meditative state emerges within the viewer. She encourages the viewers to experience peace and serenity that she has
experienced when creating her work. By manipulating language on a personal level, she seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing feelings. Moments are captured that only exist to challenge the humanity to clarify our existence and to find poetic meaning in the wonders of nature. By taking daily life as subject matter she tries to communicate a personal language in
establishing a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver.

Rhodes’s works focus on the ambiguous emotions that determine our existence. She explores the dynamics of landscape, capturing its effects and the limits of our assumptions of what landscape means. Rhodes documents events and questions how they can be presented photographically. The work symbolizes a woman embracing nature, not by telling a story or creating a metaphor, but rather by approaching a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered way. She involves the viewer in a way
that is sometimes physical by allowing them to feel like they are in the work themselves, and she believes in the idea of interpersonal emotions within her work. The work itself is a direct response to the surrounding environment, drawing on the artist’s personal experience as a starting point. These are often framed instances that would go unnoticed in their natural
environment. With a conceptual approach, she tries to increase the dynamic between the audience and her work by encouraging emotions and exploring the duality that develops through different interpretations.