Art Practice Commons^™

The Unveiling Of Us, Alexis Parra

Senior Projects Spring 2018

The Unveiling of Us is an affirmation by, of and for wom^n of color. In this collaboration, we - subject and photographer - seek to reclaim the performance, production and beauty of individual identities that are informed by collective pasts. Everyday acts of performance are emphasized in these images through objects and gestures that reference the day to day practices of black and brown wom^n based on our histories, our cultures and our senses of self. This is our space to claim: the viewer looks, but the subjects hold the gaze as they declare power through a notion of beauty. …

Devorah, Jackson Siegal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

In Devorah, I sought to deliver an image to a text I could only engage with through removal. Unable to read the original Yiddish memoir written by my great grandmother, Devorah Schneider, I relied on a translation. Upon realizing that a photograph of the world couldn’t properly illustrate the experiences I was reading, I decided to expose photographic paper beneath an empty enlarger, one with no negative. As the blank projections bled, grew, shrunk and glowed in my darkroom, I began to build an abstract language in dialogue with Devorah’s words.

The project began when I decided to engage with …

Heaven On A Bun, Eleanor Gibney

Senior Projects Spring 2018

We are told from a young age, how to act, what is polite, what is acceptable; we start living within restrictions, within boundaries. This causes our conversations to become limited and our interactions tense. To escape from these restrictions we escape to our thoughts, our own private haven where judgment is not passed.

In this project, I explore a world of my creation where the space between our physical world and mental world is bent, or in other words, the bending of fantasy and reality. Being placed in the middle of this other world, things and interactions don’t seem quite …

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 …

I Have Never Stepped In The Same River Twice, Madison Hailey Emond

Senior Projects Spring 2018

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

I never knew that I would learn to walk the Sawkill River in moonlight, that I would come to know its contours and the depths of its waters so well. I never expected that the tree roots and rocks that lay in my path to its banks would know my gait so fully.

This project began as a reaction to the hurricanes that struck the Caribbean last fall. It felt apt to question landscape imagery and how …

American Idyll: A Place To Call Home, Bowen Walsh Fernie

Senior Projects Spring 2018

I was raised in Italy from the age of five and when I returned to the United States at eighteen, I was surprised by the way I was affected by the landscape I had never known or explored. I found myself drawn to American culture as it is stereotypically represented in movies and TV - the quaint houses, the schools with cheerleaders and locker rooms, the drive-in movie theaters – and began to examine how those stereotypes are reflected in the real world. From this initial interest I began exploring the American space that I envisioned myself inhabiting throughout my …