New media artist, and professor at Penn State Greater Allegheny, Lori Hepner, spoke to students about her artwork as part of the media arts visiting artists and scholarship program.

Hepner, who has trained in several different countries throughout her career as an artist and a professor, shared some of the concepts that helped create some of her more recent works.

“I was actually in Kosovo when Covid happened, and I got a call from the embassy saying ‘hey, you’re leaving today. Pack up.’ It was like March 13”, said Hepner. “And I went, and when I came back I had these photographs that I took out of the window of the plane that was taking me to Kosovo, and it was this beautiful sunset. So, I had this sky sunset picture that I used to make these light paintings for the airport. Because I was making art while I was traveling and kind of processing that experience. So, while it’s all abstract, it all sort of relates.”

One of her projects entitled “Larimer Caryatids,” which was a community-based project, shows children and adults interacting with one another through the movement of light.

“This is the kind of images we were making with the light painting,” Hepner said. The kids were taking portraits of each other, and this is one of the pictures, if you take a look, once I had all this video that we did in the workshops, [we] came back to make these sixteen and a half foot tall murals that are a bunch of different prints on metal.”

Hepner detailed many concepts and ideas behind several of her works throughout her speech.

The media arts visiting artists and scholarship program plans to have several more artists visit Robert Morris University throughout the semester.