DU Alumna Pushes the Boundaries of Digital Art

This write-up seems in the summer problem of University of Denver Magazine. Visit the magazine web page for bonus content and to examine this and other article content in their unique structure.

Fusing digital art with elements of mother nature, University of Denver alumna Cherish Marquez (MFA ’20) departs considerably from classic exhibitions, generating areas for audiences to interact with her artwork.

Marquez, a resident artist at Denver’s Redline Modern Artwork Middle, explores environmental destruction, ancestry and society, historical past and individual identity through dynamic creations.

Her most current solo exhibition, “Voices of the Desert,” explored environmental destruction and justice, pushed by Marquez’s personalized link to the land the place she grew up. Her viewers was invited to not only perspective, but to bodily interact and manipulate the true and digital environments working with touch-delicate topographical maps as online video activity controllers, augmented-reality Instagram filters and a collection of dried desert crops.

Her do the job also was included in “In Illness and In Wellbeing,” an exhibition at Denver’s McNichols Civic Middle Making examining incapacity and ailment in marriage as a result of critical feminist and queer lenses.

The indigenous Texan arrived to DU by way of Las Cruces, New Mexico, where by she acquired a diploma in high-quality arts and imaginative crafting from New Mexico Condition College. She then attended the College of Denver and earned an MFA in emergent electronic methods. Her appreciate for producing artwork commenced extended in advance of faculty, nonetheless.

“My father, he employed to attract a good deal. When I was about 4 or 5, I don’t forget going into his office and hunting via his stuff and discovering all his drawings and things. I employed to truly appear up to him, and I wanted to be, you know, just like him,” she states. “So I started off accomplishing art from a quite youthful age.”

Marquez claims she’s often prevented next others’ footsteps much too carefully. “I tried out it, [but] drawing was seriously hardly ever my issue.”

Amazing character scenes on the handles of National Geographic motivated her to get up images and document the entire world about her. Snapping photos of people—primarily her sisters—unveiled an intimate relationship connecting the photographer, camera and matter that drew Marquez into the medium.

“It was a form of window into their existence and just about a time capsule as well,” she suggests. When battling to discover subjects to photograph in college or university, Marquez turned the digital camera on herself. Photography, much more than ever, offered a fruitful prospect for self-expression and exploration.

“I felt like I could have all these, you know, distinctive characters and different personalities,” she claims. “I imagine at that time when I was 18 to 20, it just sort of felt like I desired to do that. Id stuff is truly bizarre when you’re at that age.”

Just after earning her bachelor’s degree, Marquez preferred to dive further into digital art, but she also sought an escape from her compact-city upbringing. DU’s graduate software presented her city life as perfectly as alternatives to expand her coding, 3D modeling, video clip-recreation layout and graphic design skills.

Although the quick tempo of the quarter system was demanding, Marquez fondly remembers the bonds she built with faculty and students in the Shwayder Artwork Creating. “The neighborhood there—the fellow pupils, the cohort and even the teachers ended up seriously supportive, and they unquestionably mentored me a lot and nevertheless do,” she claims.