Art and Design Commons^™

A Worm Turns, Jacob Galt Judelson

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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

A Worm Turns

Jacob Judelson

“Even a worm will turn”––an idiom, essentially meaning that anyone or anything will retaliate if pushed too far. Even the weakest, most docile of things––like a worm––will eventually revolt, demanding the recognition and respect that it deserves.

I often wonder if I'm a painter or a sculptor. As an artist, I am drawn to gesture, texture, color, and material. While the majority of my work hangs on the walls of interior spaces, I use materials and processes affiliated with industrial and sculptural realms. My …

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.

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 …

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 …

The Artist's Diary, Anamae Gilroy

Senior Projects Spring 2022

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

Evocation, William Robert Gary

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Evocation

When I began my time at Bard College, I was already deeply interested in children’s Art. The ideas supporting my senior project reach all the way back towards the end of my Freshman year. The last few years have consisted of practicing, preparing and researching for what would become my thesis. Evocation encompasses a large body of paintings, prints and sculptures inspired in part by my own childhood artwork. After discovering a box of nearly five hundred drawings from my childhood during the summer of 2021, I have sought to infuse my interest in the expressive and symbolic tendencies …

Common Thread, Isobella Rose Grubb-Kovach

Senior Projects Spring 2022

We are nature, and nature is everything. Our bodies reflect the patterns found in nature—our veins and cells mimic lichen and mold, roots, water, vines.

Painting does not require a message. It is independent of me, the artist; it stands on its own, a child made by my hand. It is sent out into the world alone, unaccompanied by my touch or comment, its only task to procure a visual experience, a collaboration between geometry and gesture, for those whose eyes rest upon it.

The mind is drawn to nature; we are endowed with the ability to connect our selves …

Hunting Rabbits, Bones Olson Gilmore

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I’m excited to extend an invitation to you to join me on a hunt for rabbits. I’ve only seen the rabbits that live in my parents’ backyard and I’ve never held a pet rabbit because I’m afraid of being bit. There’s a lot to learn from the distance between ourselves and the things that are right in front of us but blend into the background, things that are always running away, and things sitting in our lap that we’re too scared to hold. In Hunting Rabbits, the rabbit represents the parts of me that get away, and the paintings are …

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. …

Sang Pi, Visakha Jane Phillips

Senior Projects Spring 2021

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

Making A Scene, Lucy Madeline Reiss

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Making a Scene

Over the past year, I have worked to produce what I think of as a visual work of translation. I have spent the last few years intermittently making work from childhood images or videos. I am lucky to have a sizable archive of visual information depicting me and those around me during my childhood at my disposal. Simultaneous to this long-term project dedicated to depicting scenes of my childhood, I have become enamored with teaching small children. In my quest to become a preschool teacher or work with kids in some capacity, I have had the delight …

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 …

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, …

Nothing But The Night, Theo Drake Trotter

Senior Projects Spring 2019

I am concerned with fragile, delicate things that have been discarded, used, and left behind. I often think of my work as a sort of a “skin” between myself and the viewer- it hides a lot but also reveals a lot, the way that the skin does on the human body. I think of the way the skin shows traces of a person’s history, of a person’s touch. Because of this my work also has a connection to memory and the act of remembering, which is often fragmentary and connected to small details that only become important long after the …

Consumption, Aurora Blake-Jennings Abzug

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This body of work is neither a chronicle of my eating disorder, nor a record of my recovery. The oil paintings and graphite drawings that make up this exhibition, seek to explore my difficult, complicated, and often self-contradictory relationship with food, and how it affects my relationships with my friends and with myself.

I am particularly interested in eating rituals. These are the sets of cultural prescriptions for the ways in which food and the process of eating can define a social interaction. Ice cream picnics, brunch dates, and Instagram snapshots all lie at the heart of my culture's social …

Through Space, Paige Lauren Eckensberger

Senior Projects Spring 2019

The experience of creating this body of work has been about progress and discovery. My pieces have been formed using lines, shapes, and color, through reactionary processes. Shapes interact with each other, responding to the other elements in the piece, either in sync or in opposition to each other. Some lines are infinite, extending past the limitations of the canvas and implying an extension beyond the work of art itself. In this way, I construct imaginary spatial dimensions that I find myself lost within.

I started this body of work cautious and rigid. By introducing the element of chance into …

I Love You Three-Fifths, Brittany B. Tucker

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Disparities in representation are gaps that can be filled. They’re also abundances that can be destroyed or dispersed. Misrepresentation is another useful tactic. In “I Love You Three-Fifths” I’m choosing to misrepresent the white body by caricaturing and simplifying it in order to address the relationship between American blackness and whiteness through portraiture. This “dis-representation” allows me to paint intimacy and interaction without committing to the Western ritual of rendering white bodies. Instantly, by rendering myself realistically, I become the primary subject. I am real while the white man is the joke of the painting. It’s a reversal of the …

I Promise I'M Not Racist, Yashar Hashemi

Senior Projects Spring 2018

An attempt to complexify race relations in the United States by an Iranian American boy.

The Long Goodbye, Sidney Meret Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2017

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

Xxvii, Ciara Neve Connell

Senior Projects Spring 2017

This show XXVII is truly a testament to the changes I have made through these last four years. My art from a few years ago was unsure of its identity and style. When I started using a technique of staining and liquid paint I felt as though I was more articulate through my art. I had found my language and my words. The large gestures like phrases and the smaller marks and the staccato of the sprays of paint were like a reply.

In my artwork there is a strong emphasis on process and spontaneity. While I learned to understand …

The Interaction Of Movement And Sound, Sheldon G. Jackson

Senior Projects Spring 2017

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

Lifecasting & Ubiquitous Relationships, Alexis Charlotte Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2017

My subjects do not know I exist. They do not know who I am, and they do not know their lives are the center of my painting series. But I know them - at least, I think I do. My acrylic paintings depict people in domestic spaces in specific moments in time. The relationships of person-to-person, person to space, paint to canvas and voyeur to subject drives my obsession to watch and to paint what I see. What I am seeing are a collection of pixels that make up human forms, living rooms, and kitchens. These digital bodies move through …

( D I S E M ) B O D Y, Jessica Leigh

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Childhood Home, Kira Marie Buckel

Senior Projects Spring 2016

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

Mapped: Intersections Of Cartography And Painting, Brian Robert Neils Strigel

Senior Projects Spring 2016

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

Mapped: Intersections of Cartography and Painting explores the role of representation in art and how we, as people, communicate through visual language. More fundamentally, my paintings ask at what point does an abstract painting become a map, and what structures and conventions do we use in cartography that appear in abstract painting? Is a map a painting or is it a functional object? The map is a fundamentally flat, abstract object to which we assign practical meaning. Details are only considered if they are necessary for travel or displaying …

Habituated, Jade Valentina Boccia

Senior Projects Fall 2015

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