Art and Design Commons^™

Mapping Maple Memory, Grace Derksen

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Goodbye? Reflections And Stream Of Consciousness On, Underneath And Around The Creation Of “Hello?”, Leonard Shevel Gurevich

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Rendering The Cyberfag: An Examination On The Spatial Sociology Of Grindr, Matthew Paul Gershovich

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Rendering the Cyberfag: An Examination on the Spatial Sociology of Grindr attempts to dissect, theorize, and expose the current dismality of gay existence and space in direct correlation with the inception of the digital realm. The investigation begins by establishing a lexicon of socio-spatial attributes that aim to establish the reader within a basis of the spatial vulnerabilities attached with queer identities. A contextualizing chronology of aspects of queer history is presented; beginning with the act of cruising, and its subsequent demise during the AIDS epidemic. In parallel, the thesis follows the creation of the internet, which birthed gay anonymous …

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.

My Beulah, Georgia Edlyn Lenz

Senior Projects Spring 2023

My mom and dad owned two sister cats when I was born, Beulah and Yoyo. Yoyo was shy and moody, while Beulah was patient, kind and wide faced. Beulah was my chariot and my stuffed animal. She was almost like an older sister to me. So patient with me even when I would try to ride her like a pack animal.

It wasn’t until this year that I decided to look into the etymology of the name Beulah. I don’t think I’d ever heard of anyone named Beulah other than my cat, but I knew it had to come from …

Contained Messes, Cora M. Quinlan

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Contained Messes is an installation consisting of a range of sculptures or bundles that communicate my urgency for self-preservation. I put up massive boundaries when other people try to tell me about myself. When I think of setting boundaries, I think of building walls and I’ve built a lot of walls at Bard. The threat level determines the height and durability of the walls I build. When I started this project, I took a step back to look around and realized that I built myself a big house, an oyster shell if you will, suitable only for myself. Here, I …

Creating And Maintaining A Web-Based Platform For The Bard College Archaeological Forest Site, Rose Battista

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

Main project is the website: bardforestsite.com

Tryna Be A Mountain, Aru Apaza

Senior Projects Fall 2023

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

Resonance Of The Unseen, Dung Thi Thuy Nguyen

Senior Projects Fall 2023

in the moment

playful

in memory of

learning

altogether

Thuy-Dung (Julius) Nguyen's exhibition, 'Resonance of the Unseen,' confronts the sensory saturation of contemporary life by elevating the unobserved aspects of perception. Through sound, scent, and touch, this immersive installation encourages a rediscovery of the elemental experiences of life. The show illuminates the concept of absence, not only as something lacking but as an integral part of the sensory narrative, inviting a deeper resonance with the world.

Living Things, Luca Nicholas Mccarthy

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Living Things is a multi-part, multi-media installation which explores the mutual and cyclical impacts between us, objects, and environment. The work is separated into two parts, or “ecophases,” which form a narrative for the life cycle of the things we are surrounded by.

Ecophase 1, exhibited in the artist’s studio. Home. Mutual dependence: Our role breathing life into our belongings through use and care. Their role as points of reference for the way we live. Making sense of what surrounds us; perception of objects altered by association, memory, engagement.

Ecophase 2, a site-specific installation taking place outside the building. Outliving …

A Wound, A Residue, Nicole Dolores Schemansky

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Audience Patina: An Enmeshment Of Architecture And Theater, Alison R. Kane

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This senior project entitled Audience Patina: An Enmeshment of Architecture and Theater explores the interconnections and juxtapositions between environmental topographies, liminal space, and imaginary dreamscapes. The project consists of interdisciplinary research used to create a large-scale installation piece, as well as the direction of the play The Stars Come Out at Night. This installation was created in conversation with the play, which was written by fellow theater department senior, Emily Kaufman-Bell. The play is the essential work that briefed the design around a dreamlike environmental imagery. The design and research explore how space and bodies communicate with each other …

Signs To Stop, Finn Tait

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Take this as a Sign-

At night it is so much easier to believe a story. There is a forgiveness at night, an expanding of what might be possible. I first learned how to tell stories in the dark, from listening to my dad's voice as I drifted off to sleep, from the whispered voices of my friends around a fire, from the car tape player on a long drive home. It is easy to imagine that something terrible stands just beyond the headlight's reach, looks back at you from your dark bathroom mirror, or lurks just behind your bedroom …

She Is Clothed With Strength And Dignity; She Can Laugh At The Days To Come!, Immanuel J. Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Motherhood in the words of Aunt Brenda.

See, we look at our parents first as these godlike figures like they're going to figure it out, not realizing that they were children. They were people. They had dreams and aspirations and all that. And when you strip that away, the title of mother– parent– this woman…. Who is that person?

Well, they're a person. They bleed just like you. They had dreams and thoughts and all that, just like you.

You know, I challenge everybody, you know, take your mother or father off of that godlike pedestal because you'll find that …

Party Of Immortals, Hyazinth S. Baumann

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I am the cook of a queer kitchen for characters. Who wants to come out? Where’s the seasoning? So far I’ve had a nonbinary Hebrew angel, a trans Dionysus, a drag dragon, and an agender winter spirit inhabit my physical form. Each mythic persona is meant to serve a new dish on the table. Lailah externalizes her/my spiritual awakening. Dionysus realizes his/my ideals of re-normalizing nudity. Darastrix serves in reaction to the history of womanhood and investigates the strange and magical beginnings of her/my childhood. Perchta practices durational performance and processes its/my Austrian heritage.

Zines are self-produced, self-published bodies of …

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. …

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, …

Feeding Trans-Sense: Gender And Digestion In The Futurist Project, Jackie G. Zeller

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Dead Weightless, Isaiah Schwartz

Senior Projects Spring 2021

There is more than convenience embedded into my attraction to the unrefined materials that I work with. Shopping cart (baby size), palette, cheesecloth, bucket, and window. Each is rich with an individual history that expands beyond the use it was intended for. Suspending them in the air is my observance of the sanctity of their mundane uses. To create something new, also out of these unrefined materials, and to refuse to polish it. To have resolution in a thing that is also ambiguous. I can find intrigue in a million different things as soon as I pay attention to them. …

Hut Annandale: Humblest Dwelling, Ruiqi Zhu

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Lots of us have a dream deep down in the heart: to get away from the congested cities and live in a hut in nature. French port Jean Wahl once wrote: The frothing of the hedges I keep deep inside me. In my project, he explored this dream and constructed a group of architectural structures by hand for those potential hermits. Studying at Bard College, I have found this region is a place with a great hermit culture. With the picturesque scene of nature and the location near the New York Metropolitan area, here the mid-Hudson Valley has attracted lots …

Can You See It?: Providing Visual Arts Access To Audiences With Visual Impairment And Blindness, Rowan A. Puig Davis

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

Open Sans, Access Incomplete, Lia J. Taus

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Why do some have access while others do not?

Think about your answer, don’t say it aloud.

To say it out loud is a privilege which we have and others do not.

Two ways to see it: what are you restricted from and others have access to?

Or: what do you have access to which others are restricted from?

Each of us are unique compilations of acquired knowledge.

Which is based on the availability and limitations of opportunities.

The unfortunate hierarchy of the world is decided by education and wealth.

Education is not freely available.

We are all told “you …

Matters Of The Heart, Eavan M. Burke

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

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, …

Embedded: The Bed As An Art Object, Maya Annika Teich

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

An Echo Of Light, Anaka Marie Wetch

Senior Projects Spring 2020

My senior project film an Echo of Light is an experimental 16mm film exploring light as both a metaphysical and physical process. I became interested in light during my studies in holography, which is a medium revolving around the interference of light. I studied holography independently and with the guidance of professionals in the field. My holographic work is oriented around the natural world and its micro-constituents. I examined and photographed substances, such as salt, pyrite, and quartz with the scanning electron microscope at Bard. These materials have striking crystalline geometry which I intend to explore through the light dependent …

Programming Proletarian Literature: Kobayashi Takiji’S "Kani Kôsen" And Gaming As Reading, Jacob Philip Fisher

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Abstract

This project translates a novel, Kobayashi Takiji’s, Kani Kôsen (The Crab Cannery Ship, 1929) into a video game. As a joint project between Computer Science and Japanese, its focus is to develop a game for the original Game Boy (1989) narratively based on a work of Japanese proletarian literature. Specific tools used in development were the Game Boy emulator: bgb, the Game Boy Developers Kit (gbdk), the Game Boy CPU manual, as well as a foundation in the C programming language, and some lower level systems experience. Being based on a novel, the play style utilizes text …

How To Be Okay, Isabel G. Van Den Heuvel

Senior Projects Spring 2019

I began this line of thought with the desire to understand human connection. I want to know how people operate both as individuals being perceived as well as how they connect to each other in small, casual ways. Acts like introducing yourself, or navigating in a crowded place seemed like skills that everyone had learned on the day I had skipped class. This began as a private venture, an intensifying of my day to day attempts of applied observation. My result, rather than gradual mastery of interpersonal relations, was deeper confusion and frustration. I wanted instruction, but the construction of …

Sanguine Salvation: Pilgrimage And Penance At The Sanctuary Of Chimayo, Isabella J. Spann

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College