Artist Talk: Amber Hoy

Where: Cypress College Art Gallery

“Entrenched is an ongoing collection of images and audio stories that describe my experience as a woman in the military. I started gathering and organizing these materials as a way to reflect on the intersection of the trauma of war and the experience of being a woman both inside and outside the military. I organize the images to emphasize the gap between the moment of shooting these photographs or experiencing the events and the time of collecting or recalling them, a gap of sometimes many years. This rift, along with the divergence of materials and forms – snapshots, art photos and audio – highlights the search for a way to talk about and represent the complex divisions between, and superimpositions of soldier and woman, past and present, experience and reflection.”

Amber Hoy grew up in Yankton, South Dakota. She enlisted in the US Army and deployed to Qayyarah West, Iraq as an ammunition specialist from 2006-2007 with the 592nd Ordnance Company. After coming back from Iraq, she became a Public Affairs Specialist and joined the 314 PA Detachment. She later received her Bachelor of Arts degree with an emphasis in photography from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2011 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography + Integrated Media from Ohio University in 2015. Since then, Hoy has exhibited with the San Francisco Art Commission, and at venues that include the National Veterans Art Museum, College of the Redwoods, Cal Poly University and the Worth Ryder Gallery, UC Berkeley.