Adriana Nannini is an artist and art educator located in Charlottesville, Virginia. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from James Madison University in 2010 with a concentration in photography. Following JMU, she achieved her Master of Arts in Teaching from Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. She currently teaches elementary school visual arts in Charlottesville with a concept-based approach to art education.
Adriana’s photographic work is predominantly darkroom-based and largely metaphoric in nature. Her chosen medium is large format photography. A large format field camera shoots negatives one at a time on a 4×5” sheet of film that must be processed by hand in complete darkness. Using such outdated technology is a labor-intensive process, leaving much room for error. Any small scratch or speck of dust becomes quite obvious once the negative is enlarged and printed onto paper. However, peculiar focal techniques and blurring effects can be achieved with a large format camera that are impossible with any other camera. The long, hands-on process that is required to develop such a negative in complete darkness causes Adriana to become very attached to each image she produces. Without any light or sound for nearly thirty minutes, she develops a bond and connection with each and every sheet of film.
By using Van Dyke Brown and photo transfer processes, Adriana is able to combine her love for painting and markmaking into her photography by creating a painterly, hand-manipulated image. Her subject matter almost exclusively includes the human figure and/or fish. She feels a deep appreciation for the human form and a personal connection between that and fish as a metaphor for the concept of “bait”.
In addition to photography, Adriana has an extensive background in painting. She utilizes the act of painting as an outlet through which to release emotion. Unlike her photographic work, most of her acrylic paintings are vibrant and colorful in nature and are rendered with palette knives instead of brushes.