Via Basel: 2015 Scholarship Recipient

2015 Recipient
of the Rosalind & Christopher Al-Aswad Memorial Scholarship

In the fall of 2005, the Al-Aswad family, along with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), held an exhibition of all the works of Rosalind Al-Aswad, our Escape Into Life founder’s mother. When Rosalind attended the SAIC (class of 1991), she was concerned for her fellow classmates who were working hard to make ends meet. Following the exibition, in her memory, the family created a fund for student assistance. Some of the recent scholars and recipients of these awards were Cecilia Masuko Iwata (BFA 2014), Frank Tracy Nagy (BFA 2014), and Roy Torres (BFA 2016). We are honored to announce the most recent recipient, for the academic year 2014-2015, of the Al-Aswad Memorial Scholarship:

Lori Chung (BFA 2016)

About the Artist 

Lori Chung was raised in a small town called Suwanee in Georgia. Her interest in photography sparked at the end of her junior year in high school. In buying her first camera that summer, she took it everywhere with her and began shooting everything she saw. Regardless of how interesting or dull the space was, she photographed it. In the fall of 2012, she began attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to pursue her dream of becoming a photographer. In beginning her career at SAIC, Lori was discouraged by the immense amount of talented artists that surrounded her and thought her work did not meet the standards of what “art” was. After a year or so, she had been thoroughly exposed to a wide variety of thoughts and ideas that were very different from her own, which opened her eyes to new discoveries about her practice. By meeting other artists and with the guidance of the intelligent professors she took classes with, she was able to slowly direction herself on the path that she desired. With her last year approaching, Lori has decided to pursue a career in editing, which includes photography, film, and graphic design. 

 Artist Statement

There are still discoveries to be made in my line of art making. Experimentation is a huge part of my practice and one medium that always has a role in each project I take on is photography. Though I have worked with straight photography, it never interested me as much as it did when I combined photography with other mediums. 

This project is called Untitled (Thread). This project is one of the many experimentation projects that I have done. My intent was to experiment with thread on photographs and create illusions by directly applying the thread onto the photograph, which are about 11×17 inches. This project was very labor intensive. Depending on the amount of detail that I decided to include, each photograph took about four to nine hours to create. I created ten of these images. Most of the successful ones were planned ahead of time in photoshop and others were solely based on what I imagined in my head. A couple were created by researching geometric shapes and patterns. 

Lori Chung at Behance

Mother’s Day 2015

Mother’s Day 2014

Mother and Child Reunion