Christopher W. Weeks is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida where he has served on the full-time faculty since 2007. His artwork and photography have been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions over the past 25+ years, including venues in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Albuquerque, San Diego, and Tampa, as well as Cuauititlan Izcali, Mexico, and Chiang Mai, Thailand. In addition, his work has been reviewed in the NY Times (2007), In These Times Magazine (2006), and Boston’s artsMEDIA Magazine (2005) amongst other periodicals. He was awarded New Mexico State Art Research Grants in 1994 and 1995, and a Hillsborough County Individual Artist Grant in 2007. A monograph of his roller derby photography, entitled "Women Who Fly", was published in 2018. A second photographic monograph entitled, “The Enchanted Forest”, which documented Renaissance Festival cosplayers was published in 2019.
“Modern Mythos: The New Gods”, was begun in 2017, and fuses art history and popular culture references to explore the human predilection for myth-making as a means of social commentary. Myth-making has been at the core of every recorded human civilization. Fantastical stories of Gods, great heroes, scandalous villains, and menacing monsters have been used to make sense of the world, address social mores and taboos, and present idealized versions of our best (and sometimes worst) selves. Building upon the current super-hero obsession in popular culture, this work merges contemporary fascinations popular media storytelling with art history in order to draw parallels between the legacies of historical and contemporary myth making. The images replace historical/biblical/mythological figures with super hero/comic book/pop culture media references, thus conflating mythological narratives of the past and present in order to address a variety of issues present in contemporary society.
