About Me:

I am 23 years old, my name is Billy Mabrey, and live just outside of Dallas, Texas in the City of Grapevine, Texas which borders the DFW international airport. I've lived here since 1988 when I was a mere 5 year old kid, watching airplanes fly overhead and the moon and stars on clear nights. I am now a 2005 graduate of Southern Methodist University with a B.F.A. in Studio art, with concentrations in Photography and Printmaking.

So far in this life I have been only a child, occasional long-term boyfriend, student, graduate, and a part time Pizza Guy when the bills need to be paid. I am hopeful to get started in a career as a full-time professional photographer.

I have a wide range of random interests including Music performance and Recording, Acoustics, Cosmology and Astrophysics, Mathematics, Aquariums, the mind and perception, and of course Photography and Art.

I started printing Gum Bichromate prints during College when I learned the process and found a knack and love for it almost immediately. Throughout life I have found I am pretty good at anything I attempt, causing friends or peers sometimes to be envious of my abilities. I never hold short on helping them learn as well. It isn't luck, or talent really. It is purely trying to understand every facet of how something works. I know how to use something effectively only after I know almost every aspect about it. Gum printing is no different.

Shows

I have shown my work publicly few and far between, aside from the frequent critiques with classmates and professors. Also, I have received a few awards for my work. I would like to one day expand this list of accomplishments, of course.

• Grapevine High School Spring Art Show - 2001, 1st Place Senior Portfolio

• Bachelor of Fine Arts Qualifying Exhibition - May 2005, Pollock Gallery at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.

• Surfacing - May-June 2005, The Mckinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas, Texas.

• Visions (group show)- October 2006, The UNT Medical Science Center, Ft.Worth, Texas.

The Statement:

In my work, I often explore the world behind what people normally choose to perceive. Be it the physical clockwork behind places and things, or a thought or feeling about the subject of an image. Photography allows me to do this by objectively retaining most of what was there in the world at a location of space and time. Using the photograph as a template, and through the selective and additive editing processes of printing, I bring my own vision into existence.

My interests in human perception and physics have given me a new outlook on existence, new to myself at least. I do not believe in any mythological gods or tinkering spirits that meddle in our affairs. Religions and new age philosophies give way to further blinding of perceptions, and that is the root of misunderstandings, wars, and terror.

The image to the left looks straight down, and also out across the horizon at the same time. The photograph is less about the subject of the photo, some scene at the beach. It is a photograph about our own position high above the ground. We find our bearings from an awareness of what direction gravity pulls and the assurance of a stable horizon that follows our altitude. This image casts both signals to our minds at once causing a disoriented yet clearer perception of what was "really" there.

We are, in fact, still blinded from a great deal of the strange place in which we live. We can only see so far, hear so many frequencies, see so many wavelengths of light, or notice only a moment of time. We are only indirectly, inaccurately observing our universe as our physiology allows.

The colors we see and the sounds we hear are in our minds constructed from the physical input, not in materials themselves. We are tricked from birth into seeing a world which we created from the seemingly existent objects around us, constantly weighing and debating in our minds what we are experiencing.

Our Bodies are cameras and our minds are photographs.

The world that exists is raw. I cook the world into my own with every perception and experience I make of it, and with every tool I use as an artist. I am glad to share my delicacies with you.

I am, as you, an interpreter of the universe.