Art and Design Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Realm Of Remembrance, Brandon Vanbach

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

In September of 2021, I turned 21 years old. During that time I also discovered a 8mm video tape in my childhood home. Unbeknownst to me, this tape, which hadn’t seen the light of day since its conception, would end up consuming my life.

The tape was a home movie filmed by my mother and her partner at the time during an outing to Vietnam in 2005. The footage consisted mostly of landscapes and claustrophobic close-ups of distant relatives. Rarely would I enter the frame. But I wasn't interested …

This Side Of Silver, Bennett Wood

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

To All That Will Ever Be, Has Been, And Is., William Silverstein

Senior Projects Fall 2023

Artist Statement:

Broadly, this exhibition celebrates steel and the transfer of force, both figuratively and literally, from one object to another. Metal is a medium that resists your inputs yet uniquely captures the labor required to shape it. In my work, I have blended historical and modern metalworking techniques to create my interpretations of natural and manmade objects.

Degradation, deformation, and pushing material to its limits have all been key elements of my process. How much weight can a weld hold before it fails? How thin can a surface be sanded before collapsing?

In recent years, I have been very …

Les Six Continents: An Exploration Of Political Visual Rhetoric In Public Sculpture, Olivia Liu Guillotin

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Les six continents series stands as remnants of the 1878 Exposition Universelle and as a visual marker of the cultural, social, and economic culture of the time period. The series, serving as public art, continues to inform and participate in its environment and space, as it is on display by the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay today. Personified representations of Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania as allegorical female figures, the series offers insight into the colonial world where it emerged, and how its impact has visually been ingrained in contemporary society. By using these six statues …

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 …

Barking With The Dog, Cameron Orr

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Artist Statement

“Barking With The Dog” got its’ title from a poem by Leonard Cohen:

I never really understood

what he said

but every now and then

I find myself

barking with the dog

or bending with the irises

or helping out

in other little ways

“Barking With The Dog” is a series of illustrative collages, linocut prints, an upcycled bench containing personal artifacts, drawings and collage on the walls and floor. These pieces are connected through visual content, physical medium, and artistic intention. The collages are made using upcycled prints and drawings. These pieces represent the early stages 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. …

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. …

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, …

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 …

The Soft Animal Of Your Body: Seven Attempts To Explain Chronic Illness To Myself And To You, June Naureckas

Senior Projects Fall 2018

THE SOFT ANIMAL OF YOUR BODY – ARTIST’S STATEMENT

If I knew how to explain vision loss or chronic pain, I wouldn’t have started this senior project.

How do I communicate the knowledge that my body is slowly failing me, that even the best treatments aren’t guaranteed to work? With whom do I have to speak with to be heard and understood? I’ve previously attempted dictionary definitions, disability accommodation letters from the Bard Learning Commons, repeatedly cancelling plans with friends until they stop inviting me to things, and passive-aggressive conversations with my neurologist. None of these efforts have worked out …

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 …

"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 …

It Takes A Long Time To Move, Issy Marie Cassou

Senior Projects Spring 2017

A doorway.

A grave.

A body.

A scar.

The hole was dug in my studio a month after I had moved in and the day after I burned my foot in the metal shop. A new navel sits on the top of my left foot and a raised scar marks an accidental grave in the ground of studio ten in Red Hook, New York. It came from water. A leaking pipe. Blueprints of the building did not point here as the source of the water main because there are no blueprints. Instead, a pipe in the corner and a shot …

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 …

Incompleteness, Christopher Andrew Freund

Senior Projects Spring 2016

“Incompleteness” is a series of photographs of sculptural tableaux constructed for the camera and lit with a flashlight for long exposures. I use largely cheap materials and intend for their rough particularities be made evident. I have found that this lighting technique allows me the greatest control possible over how light renders the constructed objects.