On Thursday, artist Amy Reidel will give a free presentation about her artwork. Reidel, currently an art teacher at St. Louis University and St. Louis Community College, will have both photos of and physical pieces of her original art.

Reidel says she is a “trained painter” from her college years at the University of MIssouri-St. Louis, where she earned her bachelors degree, and the University of Tennessee, where she earned her masters degree. As she began to further explore herself as an artist, however, she felt painting wasn’t quick enough and found other mediums to express her ideas.

She moved from painting to collages to drawing to photography and finally to video. She says she was particularly interested in the sound present in a video and how it can affect the piece.

Reidel has no one favorite medium, but rather she uses “any medium that is most appropriate for the piece.”

One of Reidel’s pieces, entitled “Funeral,” is inspired by a family funeral. The video portrays a flag-folding ceremony, images of weather radar and the song “On Eagle’s Wings” played backwards. She said she was playing with ideas of “loss and mortality.”

One of her current favorite projects is making fake rocks. She says she collects rocks and has always been fascinated by them, and she has made her own crystals.

Reidel says that for the art students attending her presentation, she hopes to “show that a career as an artist is possible, even if it doesn’t turn out as you hoped.”

For Reidel, this journey included moving to New Mexico. She worked on a vineyard, which was fine at first, but then realized she didn’t want to be away from an art community. She moved back to the city to teach art.

“(In the future,) I hope to reach out to more art students and have my work shown in contemporary art museum,” Reidel says.

Reidel says she is excited to share her work and her story. She describes herself as “an open book,” so she won’t hold much back.

“It won’t be art jargon,” Reidel says.

Reidel will present from 2-3 p.m. in the Leadership Auditorium in the MU Student Center. To see some of her work, visit her website, [http://amyreidel.com](http://amyreidel.com/).