Creative Acts, Issue 2 by Creative Acts

CREATIVE ACTS Student Art and Art Criticism Issue 2

CREATIVE ACTS Student Art and Art Criticism Vassar College May 2019

ISSUE 2

Contents Letter from the Editors Saskia Globig, Ruby Mayer, Jonah Parker, and Griffin Pion — 1 Convergence Through Margaret Reisert and Annie Duncan — 2 A Fort, a Pilgrim, a Lobe, a Glass Yoav Yaron and Ruby Mayer — 4 Yoav’s Car Ruby Mayer and Yoav Yaron — 6 Move Things Around and See Where They Go Petch Kingchatchaval and Luka Carlsen — 7 A Conversation Gianna Samms and Helen Shu — 10 In the Mind: Children Go to the Museum Curtis Eckley — 13 Between/Outside/Across the Lines Griffin Pion and Lulu Valentino — 14 Galatea Goes to the Gallery Saskia Globig and Sophia Yoo — 17 Tiny Things Olivia Guarnieri and Noa Mendoza-Goot — 18 Memory and Isolation Livia Bartels and Anja Zhou — 21 Windows Jonah Parker and Mateusz Kasprowicz — 22 Barnacles of Petals Alessandra Pilkington and Morgan Swartz — 24

From the Editors “Art is a game between all people of all periods.” — Marcel Duchamp Last spring, the first issue of Creative Acts emerged in bright stacks from the clear vision and hard work of twenty-two students and four editors: Hallie Ayers, Delphine Douglas, Henry Krusoe, and Griffin Pion. After this first issue was published, three of the four editors graduated. This year we wanted to continue Creative Acts, turning it into a tradition. Creative Acts is a journal which pairs two people, traditionally a Studio Art and an Art History student, to create a project usually consisting of a visual art piece and a written response. Some pairs divided the visual and written components, while others co-created and co-authored. In November, we paired artists and writers, and after that came six quiet months of idea-generating, art-making, poem- and prose-writing. There was a lot of trust as the ideas tossed around in our first meeting and early emailing incubated. It was slow and anxious until suddenly it was immediate, envisionable, and joyful.

This second issue of Creative Acts is a renewal of our independent amendment to this conﬁguration. We have also taken our initial project one step further by opening Creative Acts to multidisciplinary majors. They have brought, from departments founded on intersectional exchange, an eagerness to connect. It has been affirming to watch as new and returning contributors have befriended and collaborated with one another to create the new and exciting sequel to a beloved ﬁrst edition. Through the collaborations of our second issue, we hope to establish a lasting tradition that both strengthens old bonds and builds new.

All work copyright the artists, May 2019.

Creative Acts Issue 2. Set in Helvetica Neue, with titles in Arial Rounded MT Bold. Designed by Saskia Globig.

Creative Acts looks to create a bridge between Vassar’s Art and Art History students. Vassar’s Art department contains both. One might think this arrangement makes for fruitful crossovers and exchange, but unfortunately, this is not often the case. Moreover, this situation has only gotten worse with recent changes to the major requirements. Before these changes, Art History students didn’t need to take any studio classes; this has stayed the same. Now, with these changes, Studio majors do not need to take as many Art History courses. This further decreases departmental overlap.

Many thanks to the Department of Art, Professor Lisa Collins, Liliana Aguis, Amy Laughlin, the Vassar Student Association, and Vassar Design Collective, all of whom provided us with much needed support throughout this process. We couldn’t have done it without you. Enjoy! Saskia Globig, Ruby Mayer, Jonah Parker, and Griffin Pion

Convergence Through Margaret Reisert, with Annie Duncan

Back when Annie and I met in February, we visited each others’ studios in New Hackensack and realized there were threads of similarity between our art. At the time, I was working on a series of paintings of windows, while Annie was in the midst of figuring out her thesis, a major project involving both pattern and constructed space. It was an interesting experience for me, an Art History major, to see two entirely different artistic approaches to architectural space. Because both our subject-matters at that point had significant overlap, we decided to work on a collaborative project. Since then, both of our personal projects have evolved, mine in painting and Annie’s further in printmaking, but this collaborative venture has given us insight into how other artists access conceptually similar themes and ideas. The guidelines for our collaboration were simple: Two prints, one larger, one smaller, dealing in the visual language of corners and voids. These are our results, all printed collaboratively in one session at Vassar’s Doubleday studios. Enjoy!

Margaret’s corners

Annie’s corner

Margaret’s window

Annie’s windows

A Fort, a Pilgrim, a Lobe, a Glass Yoav Yaron on Ruby Mayer, with poems

When I first saw Ruby Mayer’s work, I could immediately feel the vulnerability, privacy, and sensitivity of the pictures before me, how they courageously stood bare in their green tones, their statements carefully isolated within the objects she had placed before her. All this she could do using the simplest of shapes, simplified in size as well, where a distortion of scale unconcerned with faithful representation generates an absurdity within the picture frame. Objects that Ruby unapologetically leaves the viewer behind with, reduced to their most significant form possible, begging the question: What is it exactly that I see in it? The objects of our everyday lives, being made more obscure, more invisible and on the verge of disappearance.

Pilgrim, oil on canvas Wavering faith, so Full of a future unknown And dangerous rocks

Whether through the shadows of a makeshift structure in Fort, or in the bold outlines of chairs and tables in Gossip, Ruby wavers between the surreal and the physical, looking to capture the uncertainty of her still-lifes, whose presences are unmistakably grueling and sinister. The colors are bold and carefully chosen to mimic the murky state of things, where form slopes dangerously towards abstraction. In Pilgrim, she completely submits herself towards this regard, producing an image that is jarring and unsubtle, where a light-green shape radiates out from the deep black background, seeking form within the darkness. It fights to remain separate, its color distinctively refusing to be engulfed by its surroundings, thus complicating the relationships we associate with colors—between those that we find in nature, those of which we struggle to identify with in the chaos of modern life, the dark abyss, and those which we do know, which we can make associations with, or statements, and perceive the light. The pilgrim. Ruby’s titles are carefully chosen, and they often speak as strongly as the work itself, connecting the spoken word to its own limits. They are separate from the images they are tied to, for they do not provide the viewer with any answers. Only sensations, those that appear when the word allows itself to be overtaken by the picture plane, demanding that the viewer find their meaning from within the image. Ruby invites us to look closely and dissect her titles: What is this fort? Where is the pilgrim? Who is gossiping?

Fort, linocut with collage Ranging on its own What we have built will remain Cut-up and Pasted

Gossip, oil on canvas

The green gives us an indication, one of life, ﬁlled with youth and relaxation. Take note however, this green is venomous in tone, digging deep into the viewer’s sensibility, memory even, reaching deep into what is vulnerable, private and discrete from within them. I’ve used poetry as a point of departure towards answering the questions posed in Ruby’s work, or at least to respond to the potency of her images. And so, I have decided to use the most reductive poetic form I could think of, the haiku. Ruby Mayer, your work is poetic and hauntingly passionate. It reveals that relationships between objects, words and even people are troubled, a signal that the future appears worrisome the more we head into it. Bravely exposing it for what it is, I leave these odes, but they only begin to touch upon the surface of what you have given us.

We huddle around Green plates and green knives and green Chattering bodies

First, Play from your phone Cake’s “Love You Madly” so that the car goes fast and the hill gets steeper. This is going to make the blue bend in the road insane. You’re going to feel like that post hits your mirror clean oﬀ when you pass it. A phantom smack to your whole left side. Next, roll down all of the windows and let in the smell of wind on every side of your head. Then, Watch the car from the window in silence. It’s stopped raining, but the roads spring with water. It’s good you’re inside. Enjoy how dry you can be while you watch the car kick through ceilinglessness and puddles.

Yoav’s Car An instructional poem Ruby Mayer

Now, Lay the whole painting on the ﬂoor and stand over it. Create with your shadow a national overcast. Look down at the car and think about it gassed with the momentum of the hill behind it, and launching into your cloudy day. There’s troposphere in your ears and yelling mouth.

Move Things Around and See Where They Go Petch Kingchatchaval on Luka Carlsen

him to “bypass the assumptions that come with relying on these prepositions to describe relationships”; it challenges him to think about space in a diﬀerent way. Physical interaction is part of the deal: he wants people to move his art, to move around it and be moved by it. Things aren’t set in stone. Carlsen shows me a big, curvy block of plywood, smoothed over with a hard shell of masonite and painted pink and red. He encourages me to walk onto it, feel it out for myself. It feels like breaking the rules, and I am hesitant. Do not touch the art, do not touch the art, we are always cautioned. I step onto it. It holds.

I ﬁrst see Luka Carlsen’s art through a screen. Clicking through a link he sent me in an email, I scroll through giant whirling paintings in intense shades of yellow pink red turquoise blue black green, carefully assembled puzzles of plywood, and cheerful curves of masonite, all block-colored and smooth-surfaced, things you could pick up or sit on or move around. It’s the latter that I’m most drawn to, and it’s these pieces that Carlsen and I talk about at length when I visit him in the installation room in New Hackensack. Carlsen thinks about prepositions a lot. He wonders about words like in on at with about through from by of and questions how we use them to categorise subjective experiences, put things in their place, and make sense of their relationships to other objects. Working visually allows

I ask about the colours he uses, which I see as soft T-shirt shades: they feel well-loved and slightly washed out, yet still maintain a pleasing brightness, a friendly saturation. Pale aqua, grapefruity pink, mellow orange. “Pink and red look like they have a purpose together,” he explains, gesturing at the colour combination which reappears many times throughout his

work. Purpose is a good way of thinking about Carlsen’s art. Such smooth, clean shapes could come across as impersonal or mass-produced, but there’s a warmth to Carlsen’s pieces. They’re childlike, but not childish. There’s an intentionality behind his work, a feeling of genuine thoughtfulness. You can see it in the contrast between the unworked plywood and the silky masonite in his finished pieces: the progression is left visible, a skeleton of the creation process. Other parts of Carlsen’s life also work their way into his art— you don’t have to squint to see the influence that skating has had on his pieces, particularly in the shape of the pink-and-red structure, which he refers to as his “ramp.” But beyond these visual echoes, Carlsen’s skating background has also primed him to look at the world differently, which has in turn affected his process of making. For him, skating has been about intervening into things that already exist: rethinking the use of random public structures, creating DIY ramps, modifying spaces just a little bit so they lend themselves better to new and unintended purposes. This sense of modification, of tweaking what’s already there, comes through particularly strongly in one of his pieces, a truncated blue cylinder with a visible plywood center. It looks like a treetrunk-turned-gallery object, all sanded and smooth and perfectly painted—save for a split down the middle which makes the object look as though it’s been cut open. It’s an interesting disruption, an unexpected touch of playfulness. A break in the mundane that invites the viewer to step closer, and play around with what’s there. Carlsen welcomes this kind of interaction, explains that he hopes viewers will feel they can do more than simply look at his art, which was made to be handled, touched and experienced. Seeing by doing. Seeing by playing. “It’s fun to just move things around and see where they go,” he says.

Luka Carlsen on Luka Carlsen Thinking about the process of making abstract art, it can seem like a piece or series comes out of nowhere, but in my experience, directions emerge out of existing constraints: access to materials and equipment, available exhibition and studio space, time, and knowledge of relevant construction methods. Working as an art student, the process of making becomes a kind of puzzle I have to solve to get my work to be the closest it can get to what I want, as well as the best it can be in spite of this compromise. Working on my senior project, I want my art to be interactive— able to support weight, to be touched, handled, and moved— but that’s a deceivingly difficult goal to accomplish. To be interactive in the way I want, the work has to be durable; and if I want a work to support a person’s weight, it must be both

durable and large. And to be durable and large, more often than not, work has to be heavy. Heavy, larger work is hard to move and requires more materials and space. Talking with Petch in New Hackensack about my work changed the way I think about how each piece develops into its final state. When thinking about the reasons behind why each piece ends up the way it does, I had previously assumed that each piece was a kind of obvious solution—but this conversation made me ask: “an obvious solution to what?” When Petch asked me about my process, I was struck by how each piece emerges from playing what I want to make against what I can make here and now. This conversation really revealed to me how much of the logic behind my work comes out of this negotiation between the ideal and the constraints. Constraints, while limiting, are not always the enemy—they are part of the challenge of working as a specific person in a specific setting under particular circumstances. These limitations eliminate possibilities, narrowing down my search for a solution to each work. Constraints ultimately end up leading me to new approaches to my work—unexpected methods and fresh ideas.

A Conversation Gianna Samms, with Helen Shu

Gianna Samms, oil on canvas

a few weeks ago, helen asked me to send her a few old photos. they could be anything, she said, me as a baby or me with my parents. family photos. she wanted to use them to create a pattern for a painting she’s making. she explained that she thinks of pattern like smell—the way it kinda hits you out of nowhere and it constantly reinvents itself, appearing in diﬀerent ways which evoke highly speciﬁc memories. helen is painting portraits. they’re of her friends. it’s easier, she explains, or more comfortable, since she already looks at her friends. this comfort is evident as she switches her brush between her left and right hand and jokes, “this painting is going smoothly and it’s kinda suspicious.” art is work, and so painting friends is nothing if not a labor of love. helen thinks of it as an active process, one that deepens and explores relationships with friends as

she gets to spend more time with them in intimate situation. her friends bring her photos and stories that inspire her paintings. she explains that her process of painting portraits has changed a lot in the past year: “my first painting was of ankoor and that was just asking him to come sit with me. i remember so well because he wore his new clothes, and we were both nervous and flustered and i told him he can’t look at the painting otherwise i’ll throw it out the window and it was on this huge piece of masonite that i was never gonna get out the window.” as she paints, i ask about how she’s gotten to this point of comfort. what’s changed since the first portrait? “i think i’ve become more confident in my work and process through this project because it really goes both ways, i stopped threatening to throw my painting out the window. i think there’s something so alive about the human experience in such a curated setting, the conversations get to places where it might not necessarily get if we were anywhere else on campus, and it makes the painting process feel very alive too.” but helen is also thinking about other issues as she paints. the series of portraits that she’s been making began with a deep frustration with the lack of representation in the history of portraiture and in art classes generally. she explains, “one moment that really stands out to me was my inability to make the color of my friend’s skin my sophomore year having painted only pale pinks and variations of that. another moment that comes to me is sitting in the deece with a friend where we went through all the parts of our bodies that we did not like and a lot of this kind of thinking is situated socially and historically, they were things that we were also taught not to like. our time is very limited i think, so yes, spending time, which is my love language anyway, self love, and the trust in looking and being looked at.” painting and being painted can be a balancing of power. maybe because of this, helen paints in a way in which the “sitting for” is obvious—the poses that the figures assume are slightly stiff and formal, recalling the forms of representation in canonical portraiture. most of helen’s portraits are over life size—she finds it most effective in confronting the viewer and conveying the truth and intentionality of the gaze. when i ask what she wants people to take away from her work, helen says she hopes they have an experience that they might not necessarily have anywhere else on this campus, that they feel looked at in a nurturing way and taken care of in a way. her paintings are a deepening in many senses of the word—a process in which she builds not only layers of paint but experiences.

Ankoor, oil on canvas

Sabrina and Sophia, oil on canvas

In the Mind Children Go to the Museum Curtis Eckley One of my first memories in a museum was visiting The Met Cloisters when I was in 5th grade. I remember being shuffled along in small groups through the building’s corridors after an hour-and-a-half bus ride, and quickly scribbling notes on worksheets our teachers had given us. Sometimes we’d need a flat surface to write on and using the museum’s walls, we were scolded by the security staff. I like to think that we activated the walls, bringing the art somewhere else. André Malraux characterized the modern art museum as one which allows dialogue between works of art from across traditional boundaries of time and space. A Renaissance painting can live next to an African mask. A Monet next to a Chinese Ming vase. The resulting musée imaginaire—the imaginary museum, or museum without walls—collects all the major works of art from history, impossible to fit in one building, and represents them in our minds. We all end up with our own imaginary museums, full of the works important to us, which we can curate on a whim. As my senior year comes to a close, I’ve been thinking about how much time I’ve spent in museums. As a docent at the Loeb, I’ve had to give my fair share of tours to the always-insightful Wimpfheimer toddlers, as well as the curious day-visitor. In Russia, I got to experience the Hermitage. I attempted to visit every room. And now, at Dia:Beacon, I’ve been giving tours to local students on art very different from that at the Loeb. I’ve had to think more about how we engage with and learn from art through direct encounters, through experience. Something we often ask children when they visit Dia is to imagine how they would rearrange the artworks they see. Their answers? Sometimes it’s stacking everything upright. Sometimes it’s moving everything outside. They understand the museum as something that can exist without walls, that they can take with them when they go home, and that they can renegotiate when they eventually return. I can only hope that their imaginary museums will continue to grow as they continue to learn and continue to rearrange their favorite works in their minds. How will you arrange yours?

Between/Outside/Across the Lines Griffin Pion on Lulu Valentino

Lulu and I talked about her work, and we decided to make a project together.

I First off, Lulu showed me two works (both pictured above), and I become enamored with the one on the right. It references Charles Ray’s 1973 Plank Piece I-II, a diptych of Ray propping himself up against a wall with a wooden plank. Ray’s work is funny and clever, but I’ve especially liked it compared to John McCracken’s planks from the 1960s. McCracken’s works are stunning examples of what is sometimes called “finish-fetish,” a type of minimalist art which focused on a refined, nearly manufactured look which leaves little room for the “artist’s touch.” McCracken’s planks are glossy resin slabs. They’re often painted in ethereal colors, weightless when seen in the “white cube.” Against this historical background, Ray’s piece can be seen as a tongue-in-cheek reply to McCracken’s. The artist is put back into the art. I see Lulu’s work responding to Ray’s in the following way. Ray’s early pieces, like much early performance art (by Carolee Schneemann, Chris Burden, and Marina Abramović, just to name a few), placed the performer at the center. Burden’s Through the Night Softly (1973) is a classic case-study of this self-centeredness—and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense. Burden lies on his stomach in nothing but his underwear, slithering across a bed of broken glass. His focus on himself was only heightened when he bought late-night commercial spots on television and broadcast 10 second clips of the performance for random, unsuspecting audiences. Lulu engages with this phenomenon by exchanging one response to minimal art for another. Where Ray reacted to minimalism by implicating his body in the artwork, Lulu reacts by implicating our everyday, domestic objects into minimalist constructions. Her plank piece swaps the bed for the body, and a ski for a plank. She props up another mattress with a precarious construction of chairs. In this way, an aesthetic object, deemed as such by its context and art-historical references, is not only reimbued with the touch of the artist, but also given an empathetic anthropomorphism; the objects used reference the body, its scale. The clean, minimal aesthetic endures, but it doesn’t come off as too heady or sterilized.

The anthropomorphism is heightened by the precarious placement of parts. Both works here are, in fact, constructed to be just on the verge of falling apart. The chairs propping up the mattress barely support its weight; at any moment, everything could come crashing down. Such a precarious arrangement of objects gives the viewer second-hand anxiety, a seemingly empathetic projection onto a pile of mundane objects. The psychological stability of a friend is swapped for the material stability of objects. This precariousness, Lulu told me, nods to Richard Serra’s late 60s work, like his Prop (1968). Serra’s use of precarity is complicated by the sheer weight of his material, solid lead: on one hand, the weight reassures the viewer of its immovability; on the other, this same weight makes its potential to come crashing down even more frightening. The chances are slimmer, but the stakes are higher. Lulu’s precarity is complicated not by weight, but by the lived-in-ness of the materials: on one hand, their mundaneness makes their potential collapse less threatening; on the other hand, the mattresses’ suggestion of belonging to a speciﬁc individual gives the work a weighty sentimentality. We don’t want it to fall because, to someone, the mattress isn’t merely an object, but a place to lie and think and dream.

II When I spoke with Lulu, she told me that she was self-consciously engaging with many of these historical precedents. That got us thinking about the specific modes in which some conceptual or minimalist art engages with the past. We were not so much talking about art as about the perspectives the viewer adopts when seeing, or the artist adopts when creating, a work of art. Of course, there is no single way to define experiencing an artwork’s engagement with the past, and any given work can be approached in different ways. However, some works seem to suggest certain perspectives, and Lulu’s work—along with much American conceptual and minimalist sculpture—suggest a more linear perspective, as if the works are markers in a timeline, self-consciously engaging in art history as conceptual moves. (This is what I was trying to bring out in the first section.) This linear perspective is linked to a specific way to view history— as a chronological series of events. And in turn, this is reinforced by the linearity of the written word. The way your eyes follow

Charles Ray, Plank Piece I-II, 1973 Tate and National Galleries of Scotland

Richard Serra, Prop, 1968 MCA Chicago

John McCracken, Blue Plank, 1969 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Chris Burden,

these very words along the line, in a faithful progression of “first off,” “moreover,” “in turn,” etc. The medium of writing and its narrative tools complement and reinforce one way to look at the past. However, what I want to say here is not that this type of art is just an illegitimate application of how we think about history to something material and non-linear. Rather, in applying a specific historical mode of thinking to sculpture, we might realize that a type of thinking can be applied as we please, outside its so-called “proper” domain. The contingency of our mode of thinking should make us suspicious, as it reveals the so-called “proper” application is contingent as well. Why is history rightly written in lines of text? In the same way that artists play with the perspective of a traditionally-conceived, stand-alone aesthetic object by suggesting perspectives reserved for non-visual arts, (Left and Right) Lulu Valentino, Untitled, 2018

can’t we also experiment with the form of the written word, breaking down the columns and twisting the lines which structure it? History is not necessarily linked to linearity just as art is not linked to some static visuality.

an ow c is, h at t a h h t? T of w and eren daries h ol, o o The difficulty with this deconstruction is two-fold. inc at oun s e b e m e o h om bec sh t bec they ts to pu ization e r o il f p y be ttem r destab ibilit licitly a u g o e l re of exp ensu rms n it e no le whe can we h t h retc ognizab d, how e st w ec on n ain r at? Sec r ca m a e f r h w g t, ho re doin izable w Firs a n g e o w t ec wha s as a r me? t ga n u a co In this latter difficulty I’m thinking about a certain historical pattern in ely r e m not which disruptive acts are reabsorbed into existing narratives, thereby distorting and diminishing their potentiality. Take, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Today, the readymade is commonly assumed to be art, and it has served as an essential precedent for so much art that followed. It is now even a cliché of modern art. However, throughout his life, Duchamp insisted that readymades weren’t art at all. The question is this: what does seeing the readymade as art conceal from us about the readymade? Are we looking at a Swiss army knife as a paperweight? Through the Night Softly, September 12, 1973

Galatea Goes to the Gallery Saskia Globig, with Sophia Yoo It was raining, so it was perfect for Galatea to struggle through the streets with her black umbrella and everyone else’s black umbrellas to make it to the contemporary art museum.

Sophia Yoo is primarily a photographer, but she’s also a deft illustrator and recently started making short animations. Since I’ve been working with sound design for a bit, we thought it would be fun to pool our skills and make a micro-movie. I wrote the script and recorded the audio; Sophia responded with the visuals. It’s still in-process at the time of writing—I learned that animating is a lot of work! So consider this concept-art. We hope this satire tickles you alongside all the thinking here on making, seeing, and interacting with art.

On the way, Galatea saw lots of cool people in clothes she wished she had. They were also going to the gallery. [Background = streetwear?] Inside, Galatea was confronted with massive shapes and swathes of color. [Background = stuff like @Dia Beacon] She wasn’t sure she liked this art, until she read that it was planned by a famous man in a famous experimental art collective in the 70s. It didn’t say who actually built and painted the art. Now Galatea understood: “The plane of the picture is what the picture’s about! The medium is the message!” Then Galatea wondered, “If I take a picture of the art, whose art is that?” [Galatea takes a selfie with a painting. When she walks away, a double/imprint of her remains in/on the painting.] [Galatea takes a selfie with a sculpture. She begins to morph into the sculpture? Or freezes and can’t move, like a sculpture?] “Oh no! I guess I’m only the content I consume!” FIN

Tiny Things Olivia Guarnieri and Noa Mendoza-Goot

Looking at the paintings of Anja Zhou, there is an undercurrent of melancholy and isolation. Each figure is within their own defined space, decidedly by themselves on their own journey and in their own moment. Her use of earthy colors, blurred and watery around the edges, only adds to the feeling of a fog around each figure.

Memory and Isolation Livia Bartels on Anja Zhou

Untitled 1, oil on canvas

Zhou’s painted figures are predominantly women or girls, and in a way reflect her own memories or reflections. One of her works shows a woman seated on the edge of the picture, back to the viewer, staring out at an endless column of squared shapes that move away from her like the scrolling titles of Star Wars. The positioning of the figure on the edge of the frame is very similar to a technique used by Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus in his oil painting Portrait of a Carthusian (1446), where he positions a fly on the edge of the picture. In the same way, Zhou’s figure mediates the space between the viewer and that of the painted plane. It also shows the precariousness and fragility of the moment, as the figure is delicately perched on the edge in a precarious, unsteady position. One of the figure’s arms, stretched out behind her, is bent and seems an unstable support in the face of the great tide of forms moving under her. Zhou’s amorphous figures, drawn with the same lines in the same fashion each time, also recall the sculpted figurines of Tom Otterness. Otterness creates small ball-like figures who enact various scenarios of his choosing, who are familiar to the viewer while remaining utterly unidentifiable. Zhou’s figures toe a similar line. Here, three individuals, each on their own planes, brush their teeth in a familiar gesture: yet each of them, while differentiated, is in no way recognizable as Zhou or anyone else of recollection. All three figures—a man, woman, and girl—simultaneously brush their teeth with their right hand while looking off to their right. All three are connected by the shared gesture yet remain isolated by the lack of a shared space. The gesture itself is one that we are all familiar with: it’s a ritual most of us do twice a day. Yet here, it is seen as a lonely, a gesture that is repeated and static, with the same motions, the same way, every day. It also can be seen as a self-referential gesture, as one that is done for one’s own benefit, and with the indication of the arm pointing back to the individual. Zhou takes the comfort of routine and makes it into something weightier: a reminder of time passing and the focus on the self. Anja Zhou’s art refocus onto the issues of memory, self, and loneliness in a fresh and innovative way.

Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Carthusian, oil on canvas, 1446 Metropolitan Museum of Art

Untitled 2, oil on canvas

Windows

Jonah Parker and Mateusz Kasprowicz Leading up to this publication, we exchanged small images and vignettes with the goal of creating something like a conversation. The images are not illustrations and the words are not captions, but they respond to one another. Whether the text leads the images, or vice versa, is up to the attention of the reader. What we hope is that both the images and the text add up to something more than either one taken alone, and that both are better oﬀ from the partnership.

__________

Fever dreams rock my body. I awaken drenched and sore. My body aches, my mind races. Though I am bedridden, I feel myself travelling great distances subconsciously, departing for years at a time. I am in a dream now, one of the more chaotic ones, ﬁlled with fragments and abstractions, twisted visions from memory. Often, when I am alone in my bed like this, I am consumed by an overwhelming guilt. It strangles me in the dark.

A curtain, sickly green, ﬂutters gently over the open window. There is piano music drifting in from the next room. Outside the window and down several stories lies a broad boulevard with busses and trams and busy little shops. This is my childhood home, in a place which was always noisy and gray. We lived, of course, under the Socialist times (“w czasach komunizmu”). I walk back from the window to the salon, where an ill-ﬁtting piano stands among Oriental accents. I see sheet music open on the table, but the chair is empty. In my childhood, my mother would play, delicately, something by Chopin or perhaps Debussy. She was always so embarrassed. She would not let anyone else hear her play, only me, her little boy. She is long gone. The music has stopped. I walk from the Salon into the kitchen and rest my hands on the countertop. I watch a tram deposit people outside. I turn back and tear, absentmindedly, at the loaf of bread on the countertop. That countertop… the brightest thing in the apartment, piercing white against the dull gray.

I hear the kettle ring in the kitchen and I jolt awake. I sit upright in my armchair by the window and look at the young aspen forest and the gentle, grassy slope outside. This was our cottage. Lissette and I bought it when we were still young, several years after our marriage. I see her now, returning from her walk, up the curving path. Has she seen me? Through the window? Now I remember the day. We arrived there on our ﬁrst holiday and were lazing, indulging, laughing gregarious, in the afternoon. We were mired in our kind of happiness. I am one of those decrepit types, those gruesome men who drink tea in the warm months. At the cottage, I liked to sit with it near the window, reading the paper or a novel. Lisette never missed her daily walk. And as she returned, she would bring with her, from outside, a puﬀ of the warm summer air. What tragic charms! For it was there, in that armchair, that she would tell me who he was and how she felt about him. I am back there now, the outside melts away. The walls cave in. The air is suddenly cold. I fall from the armchair onto my knees. God, Fuck! (“do cholery z tym światem!”).

My apartment in Hamburg, where I live alone. My window the sight of my final rage and my final shame. When I looked down at the sidewalk below I knew that I had to do it, that I could not go on knowing what I had done to her. That I had ruined her. That she was disgraced, her career, everything, I had destroyed. I could not bear this knowledge and yet today I do bear it. I met her one last time on the promenade of the Vistula. She told me quietly, “I am sorry I have hurt you” (“nie chciałam cię skrzywdzić”). “I loved you” (“kochałem cię”). I left her and walked for hours across the city, completely aimless. Eventually I sat down in a cafe where there was music. A woman on a tiny stage played a piano, but no songs I could recognize. It would suffice. The place smelled of soup. I sat at the corner table and drew on a napkin. When I stood at my window the image of that napkin came to me. It was her silhouette, which I had drawn to appear sitting in the bathtub, as she often did. The water, I imagined, so warm, so inviting, enveloping, clearing. I thought of my body melting away into that warmth. Consumed by it until my mind turns off, replaced with that soft pleasure.

Barnacles of Petals

Morgan Swartz’s work is currently centered around gender and his journey transitioning. Skyping across the world, I had the pleasure of learning about Morgan’s transition and his experience coming to Vassar from Pittsburgh. He spoke of relinquishing his former female identity and gradually embracing his masculinity and manhood. Painting has become an important outlet for Morgan, an extension of those sensations. The Barnacles That Hold Me Down was his way to process his experience of being misunderstood, as well as his path into an unknown but better future. Morgan is grappling with his attachments to stereotypes of femininity he loves and will always love—the color pink, flowers—as he moves away from past gender expressions. There is a sense of seeking in his work: the shaft of light in The Barnacles That Hold Me Down illuminates a space of understanding, an enlightenment of a truer self. The pink chains encasing the body, morphing into flowers—a representation of the creative process—are a nod towards Morgan’s internal conflict. The Barnacles That Hold Me Down is an homage to the hole Morgan once found himself in. The format of the canvas implies a long journey ahead and, if it is not too on-the-nose, the light at the end of the tunnel. The dark abyss from which the figure emerges is Morgan trapped in a role he did not choose for himself—and finding a way out. As Morgan claims his desired gender, the pink chains begin to break, and he will become fully immersed in the dark blue painted field of masculinity.

Alessandra Pilkington responds to Morgan Swartz

The two lovers wordlessly echoing one another Bodies in conversation push pull. resist press. break conjoin. Fall. the subtleness of darkness Light envelops the tiny soldier Chains of yesterdayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body begin to break gently Draping himself in petals Pink embraces him as he travels down the path of exciting uncertainty Shedding the skin of his motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s daughter sewing the seams of his chosen fabric.

Vassar College May 2019