Digital Commons Network^™

The Unveiling Of Us, Alexis Parra

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The Unveiling of Us is an affirmation by, of and for wom^n of color. In this collaboration, we - subject and photographer - seek to reclaim the performance, production and beauty of individual identities that are informed by collective pasts. Everyday acts of performance are emphasized in these images through objects and gestures that reference the day to day practices of black and brown wom^n based on our histories, our cultures and our senses of self. This is our space to claim: the viewer looks, but the subjects hold the gaze as they declare power through a notion of beauty. …

Devorah, Jackson Siegal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

In Devorah, I sought to deliver an image to a text I could only engage with through removal. Unable to read the original Yiddish memoir written by my great grandmother, Devorah Schneider, I relied on a translation. Upon realizing that a photograph of the world couldn’t properly illustrate the experiences I was reading, I decided to expose photographic paper beneath an empty enlarger, one with no negative. As the blank projections bled, grew, shrunk and glowed in my darkroom, I began to build an abstract language in dialogue with Devorah’s words.

The project began when I decided to engage with …

Heaven On A Bun, Eleanor Gibney

Senior Projects Spring 2018

We are told from a young age, how to act, what is polite, what is acceptable; we start living within restrictions, within boundaries. This causes our conversations to become limited and our interactions tense. To escape from these restrictions we escape to our thoughts, our own private haven where judgment is not passed.

In this project, I explore a world of my creation where the space between our physical world and mental world is bent, or in other words, the bending of fantasy and reality. Being placed in the middle of this other world, things and interactions don’t seem quite …

Show And Tell, Samuel Hawk Richard

Senior Projects Fall 2018

Throughout my years studying photography at Bard, I’ve concentrated on the making of each individual photo, capturing the moment, mastering the technical aspects, creating a narrative within each shot, rather than dwelling on the big picture. In creating this project I have come to realize that while each of my photographs must stand on its own, as a whole they also present a coherent feeling. They are fragments of a personal perspective – and together - an extension of the way I interact with the world, moment by moment. When I was growing up, my father used to quote the …

Normal Couple Stuff, John Oglesby Whitescarver

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Some Brief Notes on Objects: Sculpture Empowers Objects to Show Us (people) New Ways of Relating

Jack Whitescarver

Objects have legs, torsos, extending arms, faces, surfaces, fronts, backs. These sculptures are not stand-ins for people. They are objects that follow the rules of how objects stand, sit, or hang in space. Rules work as the obstructions that focus energy into the act of forming. I’m interested in new ways of relating and I’m interested in how that relates to failure. Revolution on the state level is a movement that always fails at it is simply the replacement of one system …

Xx Openings, Jackson Siegal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

XX Openings represents my dual sculpture and photography practice. The title comes from a 70’s domestic frame, with 20 openings of varying sizes for family pictures. Half of the slots were filled with stock pictures of smiling family scenes, while the others just had measurements for the openings themselves. The object struck me as alienating, and oppressive. I didn’t see any scene within those openings I felt connected to.

The frame came to symbolize varying perspectives, ways of seeing, and ways of being. As my sculpture practice has weighed more heavily on my work as a photographer, I feel tensions …

A Doctrine Of Signatures, Naomi Zahler

Senior Projects Spring 2018

First you enter the waiting room. There’s a TV on with a segment about how to cook five cheese baked macaroni with hidden veggies so the kids get their vitamins. All you’ve had to eat in the past 24 hours is blue and yellow gatorade. You approach the receptionist who sternly asks you if you followed your diet. You sit down in one of the many chairs that line the wall. Three chairs over from you sits a woman playing solitaire on her kindle. Every fifteen minutes an alarm goes off on her phone and she runs up the receptionist …

The Hour Of The Wolf, Emily Louise Beresford

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

the hour of the wolf

In these photographs I try to capture the sense of time moving and changing. I am interested in the way that light can change the way we see something. We are made vulnerable by what light reveals.

The photographs are about a specific time of day as well as time passing over a year. The interweaving of faces and landscapes reveals this progression of time during the days, the seasons, and the years through which each person has lived.

With time, light moves across …

I Have Never Stepped In The Same River Twice, Madison Hailey Emond

Senior Projects Spring 2018

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

I never knew that I would learn to walk the Sawkill River in moonlight, that I would come to know its contours and the depths of its waters so well. I never expected that the tree roots and rocks that lay in my path to its banks would know my gait so fully.

This project began as a reaction to the hurricanes that struck the Caribbean last fall. It felt apt to question landscape imagery and how …

American Idyll: A Place To Call Home, Bowen Walsh Fernie

Senior Projects Spring 2018

I was raised in Italy from the age of five and when I returned to the United States at eighteen, I was surprised by the way I was affected by the landscape I had never known or explored. I found myself drawn to American culture as it is stereotypically represented in movies and TV - the quaint houses, the schools with cheerleaders and locker rooms, the drive-in movie theaters – and began to examine how those stereotypes are reflected in the real world. From this initial interest I began exploring the American space that I envisioned myself inhabiting throughout my …

Hazel Larsen Archer And Photography At Black Mountain College, 1933 - 1957, Lucy Jean Atkinson

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.