Art and Design Commons^™

Endure, James C. Toomey

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The work is tubular: fistulous, circulatory.

It starts out as a body and obscures into something sprawling and replicating, perhaps cancerous.

Some parts are handmade paper. I begin with a pulp and strip it in water, then pour it into thin sheets— it dries practically weightless. It shrivels and shrinks and clings to itself, tenderly. It leaves caverns inside.

The work withers how I might expect skin to act when it is no longer living. I was sixteen when I held my father while he died. When I peel away my paper sheets, it is how I imagine it might …

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.

This Side Of Silver, Bennett Wood

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

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 …

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 …

Dear Everything That Feels,, Oga Li (Oga L)

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

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 …

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 …

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. …

Hidden, Carlotta Rose Maruca

Senior Projects Spring 2021

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

A Constant State Of Change, Karianne Canfield

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Collecting the unwanted waste of life and compiling it into something beautiful. A reminder that all things can always continue to change. An assertion that I will continue to change with them. Expecting that despite the disregard for what it was, it can be valuable as something else. It is not new, this form which it is transformed into, it was always there as an opportunity for it to become. Made of items from across my past, this was always an option of what I could be. From here it will continue to reform and reuse its materials and meanings, …

Hold Me, Nell Anna Dreyfus

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Through this body of work, I have been exploring objects that hold. Each of these pieces are vessels or carriers that reference the body and its individual parts. Each item was carefully considered and alludes to so much more than their individual uses and purposes. I believe that all these objects have strong meanings and associations because of their presence in everyday life--they are universal and recognizable. I have brought attention to objects that often go unnoticed and overlooked because of their common uses in everyday life. By painting them the same color as the floor, I camouflaged them into …

Squeaky Clean, Dorothea L. Mcrae

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts 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 …

Installation: Untitled#0420, Thesis: Is The Artist’S Position Valid And Necessary To Her Completed Artworks ? —— An Investigation Of The Artist’S Position Through Martin Heidegger’S Poetry, Language, Thought And The Fisherman Analogy, Coco Ma

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Artist statement:

In my practice of mixed-media sculptures and installations, I use different kinds of materials in unexpected ways to provoke uncertainties, inquiries, and reflections. My works entice people to stop and pay close attention. In this process, they may be confused and amused. By being labor- intensive and repetitive with ordinary materials, my works inspire people to see familiar forms and materials in new and fresh ways. Underneath the familiarity of the materials is the “white noise,” a hum of dissonance between the familiar and the strange.

The installation Untitled#0420 uses fishing lines as its major component, which is …

I Think You Were In My Dream Last Night, Josie Cotton

Senior Projects Spring 2020

I Think You Were In My Dream Last Night

I have always worked by creating opportunities for mistakes and then fixing them. I’ve taken inspiration from the things I pick up every day: cups, necklaces, coat hangers, tables, chairs. I’ve taken inspiration from my dreams. They are always based in reality but twisted into a shape I’ve never seen before, and I wonder where these ideas come from. When I wake up, the people or the places I dreamt about are changed forever by a new perspective, out of my control. That is an idea I wanted to sift through …

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 …

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 …

Play Thing, James Edwin Herbert

Senior Projects Spring 2018

“Play Thing is a musical installation made both to entertain and to challenge a viewer. Every nook of the structure pushes viewers to find their place within it, whether by tempting them to pay a quarter to smash an explosive phallus, or else by daring them to try out an untrustworthy tricycle. A constant flow of risk and reward permeates the space while moments of painstaking craftsmanship, coupled with the chaos of a playful viewer, up the stakes of interaction.

I came to Bard College a luthier having never taken a class in studio art. Until quite recently I …

"Can You Shut The Door Behind You?", Nate Millstein

Senior Projects Spring 2018

"Can you shut the door behind you?" creates a parallel between the basement and the subconscious. These settings (one mental and one physical) serve as storage units. In creating these spaces, I became fascinated with the container as a sculptural form; objects whose purpose is to carry and cradle other objects. Pipes cycling water throughout the home, crates and boxes holding family memorabilia, washing machines continuously cycling dirty laundry. My work captures how these containers, abandoned in this forgotten space, grow and decay. The entire space is in and of itself a constructed container a viewer may enter. Casting is …

This System Has Failed Us, Kate Murray Bickhardt

Senior Projects Spring 2017

When I go to a courtroom the only color I see is orange. I don’t want to talk down to people. The projection is level to the floor. There are 2,500 napkins. They are the people, the garbage, and the repetition of the excess, and my hope of giving them importance. There are roughly 2,500 people in the Orleans Parish Prison on any given day, but the system is bigger than them. It’s more consuming and this is not nearly the amount of napkins it would take to represent the people in even just one state's carceral system. The space …

This Meanwhile, Nellie K. Ostow

Senior Projects Spring 2017

One point of departure:

I'm trying to slow down just enough to even begin to notice what's at work here. Not just the here, as in now, but the here as in the big, vast, complex here that we are all moving within and around. I realize that everything I make is/reflects part of me, but also part of every person I know, every person they know, all the times I've questioned brushing my teeth in both the morning and the evening, every time I notice a deer notice me, curled up with Matilda inside my mom- pressed up into …

Make It Point, Peter Avery Schreiber

Senior Projects Spring 2017

1. Finding a Willingness to Disappoint

Steel, latex paint, wood. An object that attempts to make a self-sufficient structure from a series of failed attempts. Hardware shows as an answer, but over and over, an answer isn’t enough. More than anything, each answer is the sum of its shape and weight, not its’ prescribed function.

2. My Own Sliding Self-Respect

Steel, enamel, latex paint, wood, light fixture, colored light bulb, extension cord. Scale is a measurement of self-worth. Some people know exactly how much space they take up, others lack a sturdy shape in their volume. And light takes up …

Growth, Aria Elizabeth Smith

Senior Projects Fall 2016

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

My senior project installation, Growth, is an exploration in pushing the boundaries between domestic space and the natural world. It exists in a state of surreality; when the human desire to control, contrive, and conquer nature is met with the inevitable power of nature to overcome.

I have always been fascinated by nature and the creatures that inhabit it, and over time this passion has grown to become a large part of who I am. About four years ago, I began to keep aquarium fish and was immediately …

C Reverse For Care, José Luis Chardiet

Senior Projects Spring 2016

José Chardiet

April 2016

C Reverse for Care is organized in a five part care cycle: Wash, Rinse, Spin, Dry, and Wear. The piece is a study in reversibility. It is an effort to learn, to understand what it means to care, and an effort to try to achieve reciprocal balance in any relationship, whether it is with a family member, a partner, or a friend.

The staging is designed for circular movement, suggesting a cycle that is repeated after completion. The spacial structure of the piece is based on the shape of the white ginger lily, the national flower …

Marginalia, Scott Edward Vander Veen

Senior Projects Spring 2016

To explain, in a phrase, Marginalia is a space of queer esotericism. These terms may be evocative at best; rational understanding, through careful language, is inherently at odds with Marginalia itself.

Queerness, esotericism— both are nebulous terms because they invoke rejection and subversion as a means of orientation. They are always antitheses. They reject canon where it comfortably stands: the canon of contemporary aesthetics, of rationality, of identity, sexuality and body. Marginalia, as much as it is able, exists explicitly and intentionally outside the narratives that we are most familiar with.

Estranging itself from normative structures, Marginalia is given …

Even The Smallest Movement, Elizabeth Tomasine Chiappini

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In the laboratory I allow a specimen to undergo change. That change advances my understanding of the material and I move forward in light of the information I have gained. I expect change and use it as a tool. This project grew out of a year of experimentation –I built sculptures in order to watch them fall apart. During this process I realized that slow movements over time cause visible change and I chose to implement this understanding on materials that I had been studying: a slowly shrinking lemon, baking soda disintegrated by vinegar and the resulting sodium deposits. I …

End User, Rufus Alexander Paisley

Senior Projects Spring 2014

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