Dimensions Spring 2014 by dimensions

Seeing is Believing Larissa Pham Haikus Sophie Haigney

throughout

Madeline Butler

A Loss of Aura: Mechanical Reproduction Rendered Grotesque Mary Mussman

Rebecca Aston

Battle of Lights, Florence Sophie Haigney

John Stillman

Johanna Flato

Interview with Anoka Faruqee Emily Rappaport

Sarah Lopez

Letter from the Editor Maggie Neil

Dimensions Art Journal Spring 2014 Volume 8, Issue 2

Hispanic Project

Seeing is Believing

Larissa Pham

Nikki S. Lee, a Korea-born artist, creates a multitude of private lives. They can be considered hers, but they are also carefully constructed fictions. In Projects (1997–2001), she gradually infiltrates different subgroups—punks, swingers, and schoolgirls among them—taking photographs along the way. The resulting snapshots are simply titled: “Hispanic Project,” “Hiphop Project,” and “Tourist Project.” In a 2008 interview, Lee says of the Projects: “I started with a universal question about identity, my identity. The way I tried to answer that question was to look at others, those people around me, even if they are not directly related to me.” Over a few months, Lee identifies a group she would like to join, and then makes friends—sometimes even a romantic partner—within the community, slowly picking up on style and behavioral cues, until she might be able to pass for one of them. Lee’s work deals with the question of assumed identity, in both senses of the word:

what does it mean to take on an identity, and what does it mean to guess at one from visual characteristics alone? By seemingly crossing boundaries of age, race, and profession, Lee invites the viewer to ask: what does identity even consist of? How can the body be manipulated and used as a tool to describe a variety of different personalities? In the photographs, generally group pictures in public settings, Lee is recognizable as “Nikki S. Lee,” yet her clothes and affect hide her within the crowd she chooses to blend into. The formal quality of the photographs rests somewhere between snapshot and document and the frames generally incorporate the full figure—these photos are not identity-specific, but reminiscent of photographs anyone might take with her friends. The difference is that Lee has many different kinds of “friends,” changing her affect to suit all of them. Rather than presenting any kind of vulnerability, performative or not, Lee seems to explicitly prevent us from discovering anything about the artist herself. But interviews with Lee reveal a different kind of story about her Projects. Lee speaks of creating personal relationships within each group

she joined: “When you love somebody, you really want to understand that person and think about him or think like him. ” In the Projects, Lee occasionally found herself a boyfriend (or girlfriend) within the group, who could then help her “belong. ” Rather than just playing dress-up, Lee consciously alters her own personality and lifestyle, however temporarily, in order to join such groups. Depending on the Project, she loses weight, tans her skin, and dyes her hair to fit in with the group she has chosen. Her photographs from the series highlight her changing bodily affect: in some of them, she embraces the other members of the group, in others, she adopts a stance of alienation. In a photo from her Punk Project, she sits on a bench, hair bleached and dyed pink, curled up against another punk—her hand possessively on his head—both glaring at the camera. In a photograph from the Skaters Project, she stares at the camera, deadpan, surrounded by a coterie of young men and women in baggy pants. Viewed in their entirety, Lee’s various performances are glimpses of an experimental (or experiential) vulnerability, paired with the confidence that her status as an artist provides.

Hip Hop Project

Tourist Project

She sacrifices her own identity to blend in with another group, but remains in control throughout the process: Nikki S. Lee still emerges from each Project as Nikki S. Lee. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The change my body goes through and the times I spend do not affect me. They are not inscribed on me at all. Rather than saying that process changes my identity, I feel that the experiences provide me with opportunities to find the aspects of Nikki Lee that originally existed in me but that I had not realized.â&#x20AC;? Mixing aspects of staged photography and performance art with a snapshot perspective, the photographs feel natural, and Lee seems natural in her surroundings, but we are aware of the artifice that is behind each image. If not artifice, certainly a temporary and performative construction, enacted by Lee, represented across her array of assumed selves. The Projects must be read as a plurality, each one both contradicted and reinforced by the existence of others. But in investing in her performances, and letting us know via interviews and artist statements, Lee confuses her fictitious and genuine selves, displacing what identity is supposed to consist of. Complicating this further, the practical elements of Leeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work often hinge on her intersectional

identity: as a woman, as a member of the creative class, and as an Asian (American), Lee is offered certain advantages that enable her performances. For example, being a “cute Asian girl” has allowed Lee to more easily infiltrate groups and make friends by dint of being attractive—an assumption by both parties that plays with the already extant ideas of what it means to be an Asian (American) woman.

1. Lee, Phil. “Indefinite Nikkis in a World of Hyperreality: An Interview with Nikki Lee.” Chicago Art Journal, 2008. 81. 2. Smith, Cherie. “Nikki S. Lee’s Projects and the Repackaging of the Politics of Identity,” Enacting Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 224. 3. Ibid., 224 4. Lee, Phil. 87 5. Smith, 223-224 6. Ibid. 231 Images: ARTstor Digital Library

Blue August jazz, the boatâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Be still in the afternoons, Sing loon songs, swim slow. 10

Madeline Butler

Purple Wisteria grips White pillarsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;fragile dancer, Phantom dress rustles.

A Loss of Aura: Mechanical Reproduction Rendered Grotesque

1. Referred to as The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen or, simply, The Little Dancer.

2. Richard Kendall and Jill Devonyar. Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement. “The Mobile Viewer.” (London: Royal Academy of Arts), 70-85.

3. Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1936), 224.

Edgar Degas’s 1881 exhibition of La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans1 met an audience shocked by both the sculpture’s verisimilitude and its grotesqueness. Degas was unconventional in his media, creating The Little Dancer not only from wax—a nod to scientific figurines—but also from real hair, and a fabric bodice, tutu, ribbon, and ballet slippers. The realism of the piece extends further: Degas modeled his Little Dancer on a series of some twenty-six sketches of Marie van Goethem drawn in the round.2 Yet The Little Dancer conveys no movement; the formal composition of the sculpture replicates the single moment of a still photograph. Because in this 20 way Degas successfully removes the dancer from time, he deadens his subject—trapping her as an art object. In its exhibition, then, The Little Dancer reenters temporality, compelling viewers to scrutinize the sculpture from every angle. By engaging the tools of mechanical reproduction, Degas does what Walter Benjamin calls “emancipat[ing] the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.”3 Nevertheless, by removing the ritualistic, cult value of the sculpture, Degas reveals the limitations of “art designed for reproducibility” (ibid.): as much as Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is realistic, it is also grotesque and repulsive. Rather than celebrating the advances of mechanical reproduction, Degas’ Little Dancer Aged

Mary Mussman

Fourteen exhibits art stripped of humanity and divorced from beauty, and thereby protests the impulse of mechanical reproduction to glorify the human subject. By sketching Marie van Goethem from twenty-six angles, Degas both creates a comprehensive perception of the dancer’s pose and also mimics the “process reproduction” (220) Benjamin attributes to photography. The drawings focus on the exact position of the model’s legs, the contours of her nude body, the fall of her tutu and hair, the shape 21 and details of her face. Like the camera lens, Degas adjusts “and chooses [his] angle at will” (ibid.), honing in on details of legs and crystallizing a facial expression in parallel to “certain processes, such as enlargement and slow motion” (ibid.). Yet Degas is nevertheless incapable of accessing “unconscious optics” (237) and must substitute estimations in place of the instantaneity of a camera, and so the iterations of sketches merely gesture toward photography, make a pastiche of it. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin wrestles with the loss

entailed in the mechanical age: the depreciation of “the quality of [an art object’s] presence” (221) and its aura as “that which withers” (ibid.). For Benjamin, the aura of the object speaks to its “uniqueness” (223) as something that exists in space and time and undergoes individual experience. In the case of Little Dancer, the drawings eliminate the authenticity of the human being: condensing the dancer into a single image, the preliminary drawings discard her “presence in time and space, [her] unique existence at the place where [she] happens to be” (220). Yet by studying the dancer from dozens of angles as if from a single point in time—a paradox in that the process of creating each sketch stretches out over time—Degas creates a new presence in time and space, a new unique existence. In spite of the precision of the preliminary sketches, and even considering their number, this new existence does not preserve the aura of the dancer as a human being. Indeed, the aura, as a “unique phenomenon of a distance” (222) experienced in time and space, does not remain in the drawings—the collection

4. Jennifer A Thompson. Masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art: Impressionism and Modern Art. (2007), 58.

of sketches point to the difference between “reproduction” (223) and “the image seen by the unarmed eye” (ibid.). Although they reiterate the phenomenal, physical appearance of the dancer from every perspective, they lose her noumenal presence as a living being. In transmuting his twenty-six two-dimensional sketches into a single three-dimensional sculpture, Degas distills this phenomenal, new existence into a piece for exhibition: The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. The sculpture, crafted from wax and hair, clothed in a ballet uniform, and exhibited in a glass case4, invites scientific inspection. Just as the sketching artist must move around his subject, the viewer must also survey the model in full. And just as photography does away with “cult value” (224), in which existence matters, for “exhibition value” (225), in which viewing matters, The Little Dancer obliges its viewers to react, giving what temporality the sculpture loses as a motionless pose to the experience of exhibition. Degas’ audience inspect the sculpture as if viewing it through a lens, noting the realness of the clothing and hair, the posture of the dancer, the angles of her arms and the contours of her body. Any “identification with the [art object] is really an identification with the camera” (228), or rather, with Degas as he has mimicked the actions of a camera, as he has taken on its approach “of testing” (229) his subject, and so Degas creates a ritual of the sculpture out of its exhibition. Degas thus moves to unravel “the cult of remembrance” (226) embodied by early portrait photography, the “last refuge for the cult value of the picture” (ibid.). No living experience emerges from exhibition of Little Dancer in the way that “aura emanates from the early

photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face” (ibid.). The face of Little Dancer thrusts upward, presenting a coarseness that cannot embody the “melancholy, incomparable beauty” (ibid.) of cult value. Her stomach protrudes, her arms tense, her neck strains—and the aura of human model and its inherent beauty “withdraws” (ibid.) from the sculpture. What is left provokes disgust. Where the sculpture fails to mechanically reproduce a human being, it succeeds in unhinging the cult value of sculpture, and violently estranges The Little Dancer from its model. Through the tension between the realness of the sculpture and its estrangement from the model, Degas’s sculpture questions the extent to which mechanical reproduction can access an authentic, 23 original human being. On a material level, the three-dimensional sculpture is just as much a mechanical reproduction as the sketches: it compiles molded wax and what amounts to commodities of the ballet—an archetypical uniform and a standard hairstyle. Yet in its materials, the sculpture retains nothing of what it attempts to replicate—and it cannot escape an artificial appearance. Severed from its prototype, the sculpture has no original. Just as “ask[ing] for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense” (224) for the photograph, so too does judging

the authenticity of The Little Dancer amount to nonsense. However, this very inapplicability of “the criterion of authenticity” (ibid.) provides a new and reversed function for art: “instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics” (ibid.). Having removed it from the memorialization or the aestheticizing of “the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art” (224), Degas must transport his model to the public through the filter of the “artificial build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio” (231)—the politics of the ballet. The Little Dancer refuses to comply with a mode of grace or refinement. Without the aura of a living dancer, the sculpture loses its “heart and soul” (ibid.) and, inflicting an artifice of personality on the viewer—a pubescence incongruous with the sophisticated maturity of the ballet—is stripped of both its individuality and its humanity. Within the exhibited sculpture, the myth of the dancer fails to persist. The sculpture’s political situation devastates even the innocence of a developing dancer. The reproductive process of drafting and then sculpting The Little Dancer not only flattens and then reshapes spatial material, but it also cuts away a past and future—leading “to a tremendous shattering of tradition” (221) and a devaluation

of the individual—for the sake of eternalizing a single moment in time. The transfiguration destroys any background or story—there is no developing dancer; the sculpture is ever suspended at fourteen years. Even as the sculpture exists in exhibition, it never expresses a potential to mature, persisting only as a defunct automaton, unable to conjure the aura of human experience, or even to capture the essence of purely aesthetic beauty. In its failure to represent either human or ballerina, the sculpture’s verisimilitude devolves into a broken ventriloquism for both the human experience as well as the role of ballet and fine art in shaping that experience. For Benjamin, “authenticity is not reproducible” (243); likewise, for Degas, the results of The Little Dancer’s lack of authenticity—its value as an exhibition piece—become haunting, a depiction of the body shell-shocked from the loss of humanity within. The loss of aura and its accompanying shift away from cult value towards exhibition value indeed desecrates the human figure. And because it cannot move or exist within time except as an exhibited object, The Little Dancer never rests in fourth position—it is ever caught, even confined within wax and textile. In creating The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen through the processes of mechanical reproduction, Degas

steps away from the cult traditions of aestheticization and moves towards a future that disenchants and even disgusts. The move mirrors the effects of the work of art in Benjamin’s essay: in rendering a human being as a grotesque sculpture, Degas eliminates humanity from the art object. Degas only ever cast and exhibited The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen once. Yet posthumously, attendees of the original 1881 exhibition remembered Degas’s sculpture and its original sensation, and moved to revive the piece. Dozens of bronze castes were made, adorned with modern clothing fit for the 1920s, allowing for a bizarre ritualization of mechanical reproduction. Ultimately, it is these bronze sculptures—reproductions of the original—that have become iconic, eerily linking Degas’s work to a public who avidly wants to experience The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen—from every point in space, from angle, again and again.

Blue Ghost place in the Where heat is born Hisses hot winter.

flame burns ice-still,

Rebecca Aston 30

Battle of Lights, Florence

Sophie Haigney

We combusted red-blue in the Berlin airport—Tegel, Terminal C. I was going to Florence to paint but mostly to cry. I wanted to wheel colors like Joseph Stella’s Battle of Lights spinning in then out, blue orange inferno carnival, coils of acid yellow indigo an orange peel—a place in the center, green where you find yourself a kind of dark eye then you slip back into winding color you are those figures who swim in the corners like cave paintings in Mardi Gras patterns dark faceless strokes submerging into blue hot hell 31

Luca frowned at futurismo and the mess I made. He gave me postcards to copy, a red-roofed village framed by bright berries—primavera! Primavera is coming, he smiled but Florence evaporated then dripped gray and my berries spilled wine on the roofs and I melted in the evenings with brown water twisting down the studio drain converging rivers of color and me collapsing one long sucking sigh and then

John Stillman 34

Johanna Flato

2013P-68 2013, acrylic on linen on panel, 45 x 45â&#x20AC;?

Interview with Anoka Faruqee

Anoka Faruqee earned her BA at Yale in 1994 before receiving an MFA in 1997 from the Tyler School of Art. She is represented by Koenig and Clinton Gallery in New York and Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. Since 2011, she has been an associate professor in the Painting/ Printmaking department at the Yale School of Art. She sat down with Emily Rappaport ’14 to talk about her work, L.A. and New York, and what it is like to be making and teaching art at Yale. 37

Emily Rappaport

You went to Yale as an undergraduate. Were you an art major? I was. What did you study? I was an art major with a concentration in painting. Initially I was thinking about being an architecture major, so I did all the course requirements for that in my freshman and sophomore years, and then in my junior year I decided that I wasn’t that interested in buildings. I was more interested in the abstraction of architecture—that was the most exciting part of it for me. I became an art major my junior year. Did you have any teachers who were particularly influential? I did. One teacher who is no longer at Yale but teaches in Colorado and who I took several courses with was John Hull. He was just very dedicated and focused and structured, and that was what I needed at the time. He had a big impact on me. Is the undergraduate art major at Yale more conceptual or intuitive? It’s sort of a hybrid program. Because it’s not a BFA, there’s only so much studio time art majors can get in. I find that it’s not actually till their junior or senior year that majors can actually focus on making work. When I was a student here, I definitely didn’t focus on making what I would call my own work until senior year. I have taught at art schools too—the difference being that at art school students have fewer academic courses and a lot more studio time. So there’s a different kind of develop-

ment where they’re able to work independently earlier on. That was certainly the case at Cal Arts [where Faruqee was previously Co-Director of the Art Program]. You get to Cal Arts more or less as an artist, even if you’re a first year undergraduate. I think here you’re treated more as a student. There’s a lot of emphasis on drawing and moving to painting and prerequisites. But the program has changed and opened up since I was a student here. What’s it like to teach in the place where you went to school? At first it was kind of weird. This is my third year. When I first got back here, I kept having flashbacks and memories of being a student. I would walk down the street and see people who reminded me of people I went to school with. Everyone was a doppelganger of someone I knew. But then I had more new memories of New Haven, new memories of Yale. It has changed a lot. New Haven feels different. Being in a new part of my life, I am living in New Haven in a different way. There’s a lot more gentrification than there was when I was here because I graduated in ’94. So the boundaries of the campus have expanded quite a bit. The current art building was the Jewish cultural center, so all our classes were in what is now the architecture building. There have been a lot of good upgrades. I’ve been away for almost 20 years. It’s a nice thing to come back to – some methodologies and experiences are the same. A lot of the grad students I work with have no idea what the residential college system is. It’s nice to have that insider info. I think I can relate to my students.

As an artist, is it harder for you to make work in New Haven than it was in Los Angeles? I go to New York often. I have a sister in Brooklyn, so I always have a place to stay. I prefer living in New Haven. A lot of professors live in New York and commute in, but because I was coming from LA where I was commuting, being in a car, I just made a decision that I would rather commute in to New York to see artwork and see friends. Also I think New York is very intense. It’s exciting, there’s a lot happening, but for an artist it can be very distracting because you’re constantly running into people and feeling like you should be at some event or another event, and I don’t feel that sense of obligation because I’m mainly here. So it allows me to work in the studio in a less distracted way. I think that’s good for me. Is the art world smaller in L.A.? It’s smaller but it’s more geographically spread out. You can be a hermit if you 38 want to because you’re geographically distanced from people. I think there are some great artists out there—but I found the landscape to be more alienating, and less conducive to community than being here. Here you run into people in the street; in New Haven and New York you’re always on public transport or walking around. I mean L.A. has some major pluses, but there are no public spaces. No one hangs out in a square. When I was in L.A. I used to have dreams that I was riding the train, and I’d wake up and want to be on a train. When did you start making your moiré paintings? Probably around spring of 2012.

Is that the work you feel most closely associated with? It’s the most recent work, and it’s the work I’m most excited about. I think that the earlier work was sort of building up to this. How so? It’s definitely connected to what I’m doing now in terms of color and pattern, in exploring the optical effects of color and pattern, in using modular shapes, repetitive shapes to create those effects. The biggest difference between that work and this work is that the process was very different. My earlier work was all hand-made. Each of the modules, or pixels, was painted with a brush. The current work, I use a large rake. It’s like a big comb basically, to rake through the paint. And that makes the mark. So I can make many little gestures in one gesture. It kind of speeds up the process, which has been good for me in the sense that I can move through images more quickly 39 in my studio and then I can learn from them and experiment more than I could in the past. I used to be very insistent on everything being handmade, and experienced with the body. On some level I think it was good to have that kind of stubbornness for a time, because you learn a lot and it’s a very disciplined way of working. But on the other hand I’m glad that I let go of some of the purism of that, because it’s afforded me a different kind of experimentation. Your paintings are so striking, because they’re so material but they’re also completely familiar-looking because they resemble screens, which are so immaterial. Do you think about screens when you make your work?

Yeah, definitely, and I did in my earlier work too. I didn’t necessarily start out doing that. I was actually looking earlier at fabric and weaving, and that led to the fact that they looked pixelated, and the idea of the digital image. And I’ve been interested in the digital image as a modular image—an image made up of many little bits of information, the idea of it being a kind of atomized image where everything is reduced to discrete units. So the shapes are discrete units and the colors are discrete units. That’s been an important part of my work for a long time. I think the moirés just extend that, taking it to maybe a different kind of level of complexity. Now the work is more layered. When I did them by hand it was a single surface. I was moving across a single surface, so everything had to be modulated on that surface. Now I’m doing a pull and then doing another pull on top of it, and it’s actually the overlapping of the patterns that creates the moiré pattern. The moiré pattern is an interference pattern that happens when you overlap two similar patterns. The overlap creates an interference effect that creates a third pattern. That’s interesting to me too because they’re surprising to make, in the sense that I don’t always know what’s going to result from the interference of the two patterns. I feel like there’s sort of a ghost collaborator: the interferer. That’s the complicated or confusing thing about looking at the work, you don’t really know what effects are happening as interference effects and what effects are intended. Of course I’m intending the whole thing, and as I do them, as I get more information, I can predict what patterns will result. It’s always a challenge to keep surprising myself.

Is it important to you to preserve the materiality of the paint and the canvas? Or are you trying to make it dissolve? It’s a little bit of both. I really think my work deals with the reconciliation of those things. On the one hand I have to eradicate some of the materiality so that the opticality will be present, because if there’s too much physicality then you won’t see the optical effects—there won’t be that clarity of the image. I do a lot of sanding of the surface to bring down some of the physicality. On the other hand, I don’t want them to be completely seamless or perfect, because they are made by hand, they are made in paint; the paint is thick and wet and messy. I leave accidental glitches and things on the surface to hint at how they’re made. Also, more and more so with the recent work, the paint drips over the sides and I leave that there. None of them are perfect rectangles anymore; they have amorphous globs on their edges so when you look at them head on or even on the screen you’re not looking from the side but you can still sense that there’s a materiality that’s pushing off of the edges a little bit. In that way, it kind of addresses or denies what a screen is. Do you feel like the work is connected to the legacy of abstract painting? Do you feel the influence of abstract painters? Definitely. The way I see the history of art and the history of technology, it’s not a break or a stop. I see a continuum. I like to think about the whole span of technology. I like to think of really lowtech things like the perspectival space in the Renaissance as a kind of technological development for painting, not necessarily seeing that as distinct from other

types of technology, but something that may have led to the camera obscura and then camera and then other imaging technologies. I’m trying to be expansive both forward and backward in my thinking. My influences include things that go as far back as Islamic tile geometry to trying to learn about algorithmic software that’s happening right now. I think those things are interconnected. The older things are often forerunners that lay the groundwork for the newer things. And we get so obsessed with the new stuff that we don’t take the time to parse it out, and to think about all the things that led to that development. So I’m trying to strike a balance, in terms of that idea of old and new technology. That’s maybe truer of my newest work because it has kind of embraced technology, and the earlier work commented on technology but somehow as insistent on not using it or being somehow separate from it. The current work is increasingly commenting on that technology but also using it 40 more and more. The trowels themselves are custom-made at this point so I have to get them laser cut. I’m starting to draw more on the computer. Designing the trowels on the computer led to me drawing on the computer. That’s a fairly new thing right now for me, and I’m trying not to get seduced by all these new toys. I’m trying not to use them willy-nilly, to still apply a continuum to them and use them for what they can do instead of just because I can. I’m always trying to figure out what can the computer do that the hand can’t do, what can the hand do that the computer can’t do, and sort of examine what those relationships are.

A friend told me that you were helpful to her in her pursuit of political performance. You wrote on your website about “upspeak” and feminism. Does politics have a place in non-representative art? Do you think about politics when you’re making patterns? I don’t have one specific answer. My approach to politics in general or being a political person is more about how you live your life, more than just what type of art you make. As someone interested in visuality and abstraction, there’s a limitation to what my art can do politically. When I got frustrated with that limitation, I started to think about who I am as a person, who I am as a teacher, how I interact with other people— there’s a sort of political dimension to the everyday. I’m very interested in artists who can address politics more directly in their work and try to be encouraging because I don’t think it’s an easy thing to do and you’re up against a lot when you’re doing that, but for 41 me personally in my work I don’t think there’s an overt or particular message or about a particular political topic. But historically abstraction has had various political implications and it might not have the same import today that it did say for the Bauhaus or other artists historically. I just try to be mindful of the things I do, to challenge myself in what I know or what I see, and it’s sort of a more elastic way of thinking. Hopefully that’s what I’m doing in the studio and I can bring that mindset back into how I live and how I interact with people. In general I try to be skeptical of dogma, and try to question assumptions and preconceptions or things that we take for granted. And I think being in the studio helps me do that, because it’s a place

where you have to be really mindful and attentive to everything that’s happening, even if you’re doing it in a more visual or physical way. That’s how I look at it.

Orange

Cayenne pepper, juice: Licking autumn. It blazes Acid sweet then goes.

Sarah Lopez

Editor-in-chief Maggie Neil Associate Editors Devon Geyelin Sinclaire Marber Andrew Wagner Design Jacqi Lee Special thanks to the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale History of Art Department, the Yale Undergraduate Organizations Committee, the Office of the Dean of the Arts, the Yale Digital Media Center for the Arts, and the Yale Printing and Publishing Services

Letter from the Editor Thank you for making your way through this book. We’ve sought to incorporate different ways to think and write about art, through poems, academic writing, interviews. We’ve thought about how the three dimensional—sculpture, installation—can be translated into two dimensions on the page. We’ve tried to think about how art and writing inform each other. How one can be the other. This marks a return to the kind of Dimensions that I first read, and wrote for, when I arrived at Yale.