Digital Commons Network^™

Chromaticity, Whitney Anne Hagen

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Chromaticity is an objective specification of the quality of a color regardless of its luminance consisting of two independent parameters. These are often specified as hue and colorfulness, where the latter is alternatively called saturation, chroma, intensity, or excitation purity. These parameters follow how the human eye perceives color, giving us visual cues when navigating the world. In abstract art, where form is not bound by the constraints of representation, color becomes the primary tool for communication. Creating harmony, tension, emotion, and balance, the color relationships in this collection of work communicates to the viewer in a visual language that …

A Worm Turns, Jacob Galt Judelson

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

A Worm Turns

Jacob Judelson

“Even a worm will turn”––an idiom, essentially meaning that anyone or anything will retaliate if pushed too far. Even the weakest, most docile of things––like a worm––will eventually revolt, demanding the recognition and respect that it deserves.

I often wonder if I'm a painter or a sculptor. As an artist, I am drawn to gesture, texture, color, and material. While the majority of my work hangs on the walls of interior spaces, I use materials and processes affiliated with industrial and sculptural realms. My …

Here And Now, Samaira 2023, Samaira G. Wilson

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Consider my work as a thread weaving through time. Illustrations of grappling with the present and its illusive constant nature. Questioning permanence. The temporary. This show, these walls, not forever, not for lease. Just a point in time. Can we hold time? Keep it? Is it ours? No. Time is something that is eaten, driven through, falling, perpetual, casual, necessary, fought against, spent, and healing.

Here and Now plays with what time feels like and is contrasted by an active voyage to another world.

Ok I'M Perfect, Dania Skye Leibowitz

Senior Projects Fall 2023

okay i’m perfect

I make art as a way to externalize my anger in a way that won’t hurt anyone. I’ve been making art about my anxieties, my exhaustion, my fear. Some of my drawings scare me to look at, and to think of other people looking at. So then I make other things to protect myself from them, and from you.

Most of the time when I get into my studio, I don’t know what to do. I draw myself, and I make rectangles from fabric and I stuff them. The repetition of drawing and sewing grounds me until …

The Artist's Diary, Anamae Gilroy

Senior Projects Spring 2022

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

Evocation, William Robert Gary

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Evocation

When I began my time at Bard College, I was already deeply interested in children’s Art. The ideas supporting my senior project reach all the way back towards the end of my Freshman year. The last few years have consisted of practicing, preparing and researching for what would become my thesis. Evocation encompasses a large body of paintings, prints and sculptures inspired in part by my own childhood artwork. After discovering a box of nearly five hundred drawings from my childhood during the summer of 2021, I have sought to infuse my interest in the expressive and symbolic tendencies …

Common Thread, Isobella Rose Grubb-Kovach

Senior Projects Spring 2022

We are nature, and nature is everything. Our bodies reflect the patterns found in nature—our veins and cells mimic lichen and mold, roots, water, vines.

Painting does not require a message. It is independent of me, the artist; it stands on its own, a child made by my hand. It is sent out into the world alone, unaccompanied by my touch or comment, its only task to procure a visual experience, a collaboration between geometry and gesture, for those whose eyes rest upon it.

The mind is drawn to nature; we are endowed with the ability to connect our selves …

Visions, Ella J. Menees

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Visions, by Ella Menees, comprises four diptychs. While the paintings serve as a true exploration and celebration of color, each pair also has a distinct focus on the psychological and the unexpected. Littered with bright colors and surreal landscapes, these paintings cause the viewer to ponder all that is not shown. Each diptych presents the same subject in two different moments. The strange lighting washed over each face acts as a mask, whereas the background depicts each subject’s state of mind. Instead of “landscapes,” I consider them to be “mindscapes.”

Each subject has a distinct, yet similar, experience with trauma. …

Hunting Rabbits, Bones Olson Gilmore

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I’m excited to extend an invitation to you to join me on a hunt for rabbits. I’ve only seen the rabbits that live in my parents’ backyard and I’ve never held a pet rabbit because I’m afraid of being bit. There’s a lot to learn from the distance between ourselves and the things that are right in front of us but blend into the background, things that are always running away, and things sitting in our lap that we’re too scared to hold. In Hunting Rabbits, the rabbit represents the parts of me that get away, and the paintings are …

As Many Names As Objects, Luke Herrigel

Senior Projects Spring 2021

“And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

turned toward the world of objects, never outward.

It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.

We rearrange it, then break down ourselves”

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Honesty is Unbelievable”

• A Bumper Sticker I Saw

For my senior show I used collected materials, found objects, personal ephemera (both genuine and fabricated), paintings and sculpture to make installations that I would change every night of the show’s duration. Each morning the installation would be photographed, left for only a few hours, and then would be uninstalled to make way for creating a new iteration. …

Dim Study, Theodore Alexander Adams

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Making art, whether it be painting or sculpture, is how I am able to escape reality for a moment. I lose feeling in my body and have my focus directed all towards my hands and what they are doing. I discovered that finding ways to include certain ideas and feelings from my reality into my work adds a layer, conceptually and physically, to the surface. I attempt to use enough reality to imply an object or scene, but not enough to dictate what it should look like or how the viewer should feel. I find art that suggests a mixture …

Mint Condition, Sarah Matthews

Senior Projects Spring 2021

What is collected? What is discarded?

When something is described as “mint condition,” it means it has virtually no imperfections. This term is given to pre-owned objects, denoting their value.

Collected and discarded materials absorb something from us, something distinctly human. I think about all of the stuffed animals I’ve owned, how I embedded personality in and formed a relation to those objects. The stuff we collect becomes elevated and reinscribed in that way. This is true for the materials we discard as well. Each plastic takeout container holds nourishment, however temporary it may be.

The materials in my work …

Sang Pi, Visakha Jane Phillips

Senior Projects Spring 2021

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

Losing True, Maizy L. Hillman

Senior Projects Spring 2020

At the beginning of this project, I found myself researching something I wasn't even sure existed. I was searching for a word or a phenomenon that explained an indefinable feeling that I have come across in my life. This feeling, which is so pronounced and yet invisible, causes me to question how it works, how it makes us feel things, what it is made of, when it is present and when it is not. I cannot access it intentionally, I only notice it when it is already happening.

My research oscillated between the scientific and the spiritual. I came across …

Making A Scene, Lucy Madeline Reiss

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Making a Scene

Over the past year, I have worked to produce what I think of as a visual work of translation. I have spent the last few years intermittently making work from childhood images or videos. I am lucky to have a sizable archive of visual information depicting me and those around me during my childhood at my disposal. Simultaneous to this long-term project dedicated to depicting scenes of my childhood, I have become enamored with teaching small children. In my quest to become a preschool teacher or work with kids in some capacity, I have had the delight …

Present, Elsewhere, Lauren Elizabeth Nelson

Senior Projects Spring 2020

As days elongate into immeasurable stretches, memory lurks closer to the surface of conscious thought. Vivid dreams overflow into waking hours, blurring the thin line between recollection and fantasy. From the area of my bedroom floor I record these memories, noting as I drift further from the present. Which moments demand my attention? Which challenge my perception of our current reality? Which bring me joy?

Present, Elsewhere is as much an exercise in grappling with our new parameters for living as it is a study in memory. In my drawings, as my title suggests, the figures are both present and …

Good Grief, Madeleine Pearl Buzbee

Senior Projects Spring 2020

“Good Grief” is a memorial project that began with the loss of my childhood best friend, Camille Sdao (1998-2019). She was a light.

Grief is a thing that is carried, compartmentalized, expanded, forgotten, and remembered. Grief is nothing and everything at the same time. Grief explodes, lingers, leaves and returns again. Grief is blue. I know this because Louise Bourgeois, Maggie Nelson, Taryn Simon, the Pacific Ocean, my tears, the sky, my mother, and my grandmother have taught me this. Loss means wading in deep waters for a long time and you must build a boat to stay afloat.

Consumed …

In The Shadows And Folds, Julia Mueller

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In the shadows and folds is the result of a mental scavenger hunt that I began this past year, to uncover myself and find what is hidden in my crevices. It was spurred by my fear of memory loss which had grown to such a size that it sat visible in the back of my mind unaddressed for some time. The reason for this fear is not large but it feels monumental. I have been existing in various states of sadness and disconnect, which have acted like a thick blanket over my mind. This blanket is simultaneously protective and damaging, …

Making Space For You, Livia Elizabeth Sponberg-Paraday

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Making Space for You is a senior thesis submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College. I created Making Space for You over the course of 8 months in my studio and in my living room of my apartment. My intentions for my paintings are to create an aesthetically awesome image that the viewer is automatically attracted to. I use color confidently to make the paintings strong and catchy. I enjoy painting people, hands, feet and objects. The project began with oil paint and the goal to teach myself to paint an image of people in a space in …

Path^3, Yuexin Ma

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Architectural space is political.

The project is composed of multiple paintings connected by a wooden scaffold built to resemble the urban landscape. The paintings depict quotidian architectural spaces, presenting the typology of functional public spaces, ranging from the zoo and the courthouse to the library, the church, and the bus stop. Their physical characteristics reflect the culture, values, and governmental tactics of modern states, functioning as control techniques to regulate our social actions within the realm of normality. For example, in the painting about the classroom, the even distribution of desks with the same size reveals that academic institutions' role …

Color X Line, Vittoria Ciaraldi

Senior Projects Spring 2019

COLOR x LINE

VITTORIA CIARALDI

The four main paintings that are 6x6 foot are my central concept of the Color by Line theme. In these paintings I chose to work from sketches I made two years ago. My past sketch paintings revolved around a self reflective human figure. As I was thinking about the bigger scale and what those paintings meant to me, I wanted to deconstruct the notion of the figure and really break it down to the basics that for me, revolve around: Color and Line.

My four central paintings are meant to emphasize colors and how lines …

And A Garden In Between, Celia Fay Heithecker Brubaker

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

Dog Eyes, Jackson Shea Denahy

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

Nothing But The Night, Theo Drake Trotter

Senior Projects Spring 2019

I am concerned with fragile, delicate things that have been discarded, used, and left behind. I often think of my work as a sort of a “skin” between myself and the viewer- it hides a lot but also reveals a lot, the way that the skin does on the human body. I think of the way the skin shows traces of a person’s history, of a person’s touch. Because of this my work also has a connection to memory and the act of remembering, which is often fragmentary and connected to small details that only become important long after the …

Consumption, Aurora Blake-Jennings Abzug

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This body of work is neither a chronicle of my eating disorder, nor a record of my recovery. The oil paintings and graphite drawings that make up this exhibition, seek to explore my difficult, complicated, and often self-contradictory relationship with food, and how it affects my relationships with my friends and with myself.

I am particularly interested in eating rituals. These are the sets of cultural prescriptions for the ways in which food and the process of eating can define a social interaction. Ice cream picnics, brunch dates, and Instagram snapshots all lie at the heart of my culture's social …

Through Space, Paige Lauren Eckensberger

Senior Projects Spring 2019

The experience of creating this body of work has been about progress and discovery. My pieces have been formed using lines, shapes, and color, through reactionary processes. Shapes interact with each other, responding to the other elements in the piece, either in sync or in opposition to each other. Some lines are infinite, extending past the limitations of the canvas and implying an extension beyond the work of art itself. In this way, I construct imaginary spatial dimensions that I find myself lost within.

I started this body of work cautious and rigid. By introducing the element of chance into …

When Angel Met Pinocchio, Beatrice Mairead Tabacchi

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

All At Once, Maddie Rose Assarsson

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to the Division of Arts of Bard College

The Music Lesson: An Analysis Of Two Works From Dutch Seventeenth Century, Valory Hight

Senior Projects Spring 2018

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

Look&Leave, Ruby Brooke

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Over the summer I had the opportunity to study in a program that focused on drawing and painting the architecture of Rome. Upon returning to the studio, I integrated this attention to architecture with my interest in painting the figure. Over the course of the year, the figure disappeared from my paintings. Instead, I started to paint large empty interiors. My intention was that the viewer feel the vastness of the space, emphasized by the absence of a figure.

This body of work explores interior architectural space and how the presence or absence of a figure affects it. I paint …