Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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. …

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 …

A Womb With A View, Briauna Marie Falk

Senior Projects Spring 2018

I found my mother’s pregnancy diary when I was 12. The diary presents not only the story of my origin, but also the story of how my biological father left my mother. The diary gave me insight into what unfolded while I was growing inside her, and yet, many questions still remain unanswered. I have heard that trauma experienced by the mother is felt in utero alongside her – I worry one of the first feelings I felt was true sadness. Ideally the diary could answer my unresolved questions, but instead I am left to my imagination. The diary cannot …

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 …

Rehearsing Happiness, Claire Sabine Debost

Senior Projects Spring 2018

When my mum, my brothers and I learned that my dad had been living a double life for 20 years, my older brother renamed the hallway with all our family pictures “le couloir de la mort”/ “The death row”. These photos, these narrations of our life, suddenly felt like those of strangers, a fiction. If they could sometimes be unnoticed, a part of the furniture, they now felt haunting to me. The photographs were unchanged, yet the new context utterly shifted their meaning and my relationship to them. I, the viewer, now felt forced to look at the images while …

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 …

What I See Now, Shulian Nell Murray-Hilton

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Rather than trying to configure the world, I’ve found myself open to its unconditional possibilities. I am convinced that the world has configured me. In my own photographic work I have come to find that anything - no matter how mundane or banal - has the potential to entice. In terms of subject matter, I am unable to discriminate against one moment versus another, and furthermore, one object versus another. I find that no matter how familiar I am with a situation, through photography there is always more I yearn to describe. I have the impression there are things that …

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.