Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Friendly Hammer, Imogen Xaviere Plochere Dalzell

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

The Familiarity Of Hapticity Overrides The Rationality Of Sight: 'Hair Aesthetics' And Photographic Seeing, Diana Ferrell Mccready

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Spying On Life Itself, Lutèce Louise Gault

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Location: Paris, France 8th arrondissement on the fourth and top floor of an apartment building in a room facing the adjacent building and the courtyard.

Through my tall, classic Parisian windows, I watched my neighbor sit at his dining room table every morning. In the afternoon, his housekeeper took out the trash. He and his wife drank St. Pellegrino at most meals. At night, they sat down with one warm lamp on, illuminating only their left and right shoulders and the corresponding sides of their faces. Sometimes, as a break from my homework, I would pull away from my desk …

With The Cold Of Sunshine, Riley Julianna Truchel

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

I Femminiellə: Unearthing Sanctified Queerness, Francesca Stone Houran

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This project serves as an unearthing, in the figuratively archeological sense, of the religious roots and foundations of queerness, often overlooked in contemporary gender discourses, through the exposing of pre and post-modern queer religious iconography specific to the Neapolitan third-gender community of the femminiellə. Although the femmininellə have origins in a long lineage of non-binary forms and figures throughout global and Italian history, they have been more recently brought to the surface of gender discourses through the avenue of photography, showcased in digital and physical exhibition spaces.

C.A.P.S., Sydney Merritt-Brown

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This project focuses on representing three generations of Caribbean women through the lens of beauty and hair care. Together, we collaborate to document our hair stories, a vessel to reclaim our identity, nationhood, and culture. Through this lens, we authentically re-envision ourselves as we move towards becoming the faces of a new generation while simultaneously honoring the past through how memory is in the fabric of our clothes, the recipes we consume, and the hair that we care for, style, and protect within the Caribbean Archive.

See How Man Was Made, Lilian C. Smith

Senior Projects Spring 2023

First there was Chaos, the gaping abyss. From Chaos came the Earth and soon after darkness and Night, from which came Day and Light. To be her husband, Earth created Sky. They made many children together, the Nymphs of the hills, the Hekatonkheires, the Cyclops, and the Titans. When Earth and Sky’s youngest Titan son Cronus overthrew his father, he castrated him, sending bits of the sky into the sea where Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty was born. Cronus ruled until he himself was overthrown by his own youngest son, Zeus.

See How Man Is Made is a project …

Relative Scrap, Harmony Olivier Baker

Senior Projects Spring 2023

I’ve foregone putting out a more formal artists’ statement in fear that anything static might self-sabotage; I’d rather not over-inform an approach to this project by applying my single interpretation and excluding however much more I’m not considering, or worse yet, instruct you in what this project and the works present mean to one person. Rather, I’d encourage you to take it as your own experience and look for what interests or sticks out to you! That said, if you would like to know a little more, through my process and godly vision, seek me out!

Work Present:

8623 Faces …

They Yearn So High That They Have Sprouted Wings, Blake Anthony Masi

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

In Its Comfort And Disquietude, Julia M. Larberg

Senior Projects Fall 2022

“Love is as love does. Love is an act of will - namely, both an intention and an action. Will implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” - M. Scott Peck, as read in All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

Over the past year and a half, home has been on my mind. I’ve been questioning its definition and location, how it comes to be, what it consists of. I’ve been asking if a definition of home exists.

In this pursuit, I read books about love and communication. I asked strangers how they …

Centripetal, Hannah Rugh Nichols

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Born and raised in Seattle Washington in the Pacific Northwest, I have always had a deep appreciation for the outdoors. This love of the natural landscape has been cultivated and encouraged by my family over the years as I have grown up and explored further and further away from home.

My 35mm black and white photographic work explores distance and intimacy, both physical and emotional. I am drawn to the vastness of the Colorado mountains, the light on the back of my sister’s hair, small faraway figures hidden in the Paris landscape, and the tiny hairs on a cactus plant. …

Sisterhood: : Locating The Photography Of Carrie Mae Weems, Latoya Ruby Frazier, And Deana Lawson Within A Rhizome Of Black Feminist Discourse, Taylor Fama Ndiaye

Senior Projects Spring 2022

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

Near The Gem, Yimiao Zhang

Senior Projects Spring 2022

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

Are We Home?, Blake Donald Sylvester

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I’ve never been comfortable, and I don’t expect to be. There’s a good possibility that I don’t want to be. During my time of growing and trying to consider myself an artist, comfort has never been present. When I’m comfortable I'm stable, and when I’m stable I'm stationary. I don’t want to be stationary. Being comfortable in a place often means remaining there. I’m scared of not moving and I’m scared of staying in a place that I know. I don’t want to be within walls and structures that don’t provide me with comfort, and yet I’m uncomfortable being comfortable. …

The Air That Rests On The Horizon, Jane Winik Sartwell

Senior Projects Spring 2022

“Involuntarily I pictured a solitude with an immense horizon and widely diffused light; in other words, immensity with no other setting than itself.”

— Charles Baudelaire

My photographs are an attempt to transform the landscape with a camera. The physicality of moving through the world with the view camera and a tripod is central to my work. It requires me to find my footing, to consciously sense my own body in the landscape. It allows me to more clearly see the subtle geometries and irregularities of the world, those captivating and quiet moments I want to photograph. I am fascinated …

Que Dios Los Bendiga, Dahlia Celis

Senior Projects Spring 2022

My "Abuelita Mariquita" is a generous woman, the oldest of 15 siblings born to my bisabuelos. I have lived with her my entire life in la casita azul, our home humble with its mismatched furnishings. Since I can remember, I have witnessed her house several of her younger siblings from Mexico who desired temporary work in the states. No matter the outcome of their stay, she would welcome them back, her home warm and open to those who may or may not have reciprocated my abuelita's generosity. It is from my abuelita that I learned to care for my family. …

I Went Back To Sit In The Sun, Alice Flannery Fall

Senior Projects Spring 2022

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

Sit Tibi Terra Levis, Emily Kate Allen

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I never really knew my father’s father. He left behind only old cassette tapes, stories, and glimpses of memory from before he got sick. He had a rare genetic disease that killed him slowly, piece by piece, neuron by neuron. I remember playing hide and seek with him behind the cascading fabric roses in our living room, and I remember him rocking in his armchair, gently humming a song I didn’t recognize. I remember the smell of the hospital room where he died. I was 12. He was 67. Did my father have the same disease? Would he die just …

Wanderer, Yu Wu

Senior Projects Fall 2022

I am a person who easily falls into bewilderment

I love the natural state of people on the streets

I love to observe parents pampering their children, lover kissing, elder couples relaxing, women laughing, men confusing, and even puppies wagging their tails

I love this realness, even if they are not related to me at all

People's live are flowing frame by frame along the roads of New York

Intersecting, colliding

I was like a fish with no destination

Swimming around

The camera is my detector

Searching for my own past, present, and future in others

Wandering, Wandering

This is …

Between Space And Memory, Arhant Shrestha

Senior Projects Fall 2021

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

Silver Scabs, Cree Anthony Vitti

Senior Projects Spring 2021

The eyes stay closed for a long time. oils, my leftover scraps, drops of saliva and grit forming a shell, eyelashes sealing to my lids.

Fingertips, friction ridges vibrating, wanting. I am trying to touch everything, touch myself, I touch another. I lie, pressing hard and soft, things feel the same. they smell different. They spoil, fresh to rot and back again. They taste so different but are the same, different only in response.

I lick my lips and the spit dries on the corners of my mouth.

My cleft palate all sewed up. Precious little threads holding it together, …

Erratic Space, Johan V. Orellana

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Orellana's vision in this work, Erratic Space, is to document life as an immigrant that exits in a country and society that attempts to maintain normalcy through the symbolic containment and erasure of marginalized groups and their narratives. He uses the relationship between the domestic and public spaces as a way to evoke an intimate, oneiric and, mutually, crude visual language that puts into context how these two environments intertwine.

The Nocturnal, Vera Jingyi Xia

Senior Projects Spring 2021

About The Nocturnal:

I began photographing mostly at night when the Covid first got to Berlin. As a Chinese woman I was under the shadow of fear for getting into covid related racial crimes as reported in the news, and did not feel safe to take out my camera in the daytime. Like a nocturnal animal foraging for food, the darkness provided me a cover. After I came back home in China, I got quarantined in a hotel room for 2 weeks. When I returned to the outside world, covid seemed to be far a way, and most people’s life …

If Reflections Could Talk, Manley Thomas Carter Jr.

Senior Projects Spring 2021

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

Si Solo Tu Supiera', Andy Garcia

Senior Projects Fall 2021

From my twelfth-floor apartment in the Manhattanville Projects, I look down at the valley that constitutes the 125th Street Fault and the trestle that supports the 1 Train. The fault line and the trestle symbolize a fracture in the continuity of Harlem on the y-axis of Broadway separating the newly constructed Columbia University Manhattanville Campus from the Manhattanville Projects and the General Grant Houses. This fracture is exacerbated by the physical geographic feature of the fault, the man-made trestle, as well as a division that was drawn by Columbia University and its disruption of the justice system that had existed …

Picturing Rights, Judging Wrongs: Photography And The Emergence Of Human Rights, Austin Dilley

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Dissolving Seams, Livvy H. Ferrari

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Clu, Pierce S. Sapper

Senior Projects Spring 2021

There’s someone within me surfacing, a person who’s really me and not really, someone who I could be or could’ve been, a fragment that was once familiar but now distanced.

I am a window to look through, and he is within, guiding me towards an essence. I hug, he stings, I bite, he mocks, his demand for celebration, admiration, and awe for what’s hidden is frightening, but he is with me.

Protons erratically arranging, quarks and neutrinos forming into images. It feels violent, sporadic, crawling beneath surfaces, flashing little lights, little windows into other worlds. I want to step around …

Notations, Fish Chiu

Senior Projects Spring 2021

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

My Moonshadow And I, Sarah J. Sieber

Senior Projects Spring 2020

February 10

Waiting on hold with eBay customer service because I won a bid for a butterfly shirt. My winning bid was $0.32. I didn’t realize I’d won because I wasn’t very invested and apparently a month passed and an unpaid item case was opened against me. When I go on the website to try to pay I get an error message. This is why I’m on hold with eBay customer service. I’m now being helped by a person named Justin.

The item description is “Eyeshadow Long Sleeve Blue Butterfly V Neck Shirt.”

The call ended abruptly. A disconnection. Now …