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Art Writing // Art Works
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Table of Contents
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Letter From the Editors
Henry Krusoe, Hallie Ayres, Delphine Douglas, & Griffin Pion
House Flies
Hallie Ayres & Elle Fan
Curtis Eckley Does Blue (The Rest of Us Do, Too)
Sam Panken & Curtis Eckley
Way of Being
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Sorry Not Sorry
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Josh Schwartz & Jake Brody
Delphine Douglas & Lena Redford
Reflection on the Paintings of Diana Guo
Pieces of Space And How They Might Fit Together
Evelyn Frick & Diana Guo
Griffin Pion & Jude Costello
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Time and Space in the Work of Paige Auerbach
Morgan Williams & Paige Auerbach
Texture as Medium
Josh Horneff & Mikael Pluhar
Crafting a World And Fabricating Experience
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Sarah Chapman & Luka Carlsen
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Tika and Jamie’s Drawing Class
Tika Peterson & Jamie Hartzell
An Ode to My Hen
Kirk Patrick Testa & Henry Krusoe
Acknowledgements
Creative Acts
Letter From the Editors Henry Krusoe, Hallie Ayres, Delphine Douglas, & Griffin Pion
“The language of friendship is not words but meanings.� Henry David Thoreau
C
reative Acts was conceived to strengthen the bonds between Vassar students participating in the production and critical reception of visual art on campus. As such this collection of written and visual materials represents the efforts of twenty-two individuals currently attending Vassar College. Roughly half of this collective represents the discipline of art history while the rest are practicing student artists, primarily from within the Art Department. Each artist was paired with an art historian to form eleven groups instructed to create a piece for this publication. The form of the submission was up to each pair. Most groups chose to delegate the writing to the art historian, who then composed a direct response to the artist’s preexisting studio work, but others chose to co-write their submissions or collaborate on new visual projects. Both prose and poetry appear in this publication alongside a catalog of photographic reproductions and video stills. No single written or visual form should be considered as the primary subject of this publication. In other words, we hope that the following submissions stand alongside the artworks, enriching them and offering new directions for the artists and writers alike. For many of the artists whose work is reproduced in this publication, this project represents a new experience in their artistic careers: this collection archives the first instances of direct written commentary for virtually all the artists and art pieces included. Likewise, for many of the art historians, this project offers a unique opportunity to comment on the contemporary studio work of their peers at Vassar for the first time.
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Every participant loves art. This fact rings true regardless of their chosen major or the academic buildings they frequent. Following their passion and abilities, these twenty-two individuals have volunteered their time and attention to create a visual document to share with their community. Their media, intentions, and messages are diverse, but each group has animated their contribution with a desire to celebrate and critique visual experiences. Some of the contributors were already friends with their collaborators, while others were strangers before this project, but all have been drawn closer because they were excited to share themselves and their work with one another and now with their community. Although Studio Art and Art History at Vassar are bureaucratically united within a single department, rarely do we work directly with one another on creative pursuits. Each major’s academic buildings are geographically segregated from one another, and there are few interdepartmental curricular requirements which place art historians and studio artists in the same room. Upcoming structural changes to Vassar’s class distribution and major requirements will likely cause Studio Art to no longer require its majors to attend art history classes, further increasing the separation between these two student communities. In protest to this trend, we hope this publication will be renewed by students in the years to come, fostering the interchange of ideas that can exist between art historians and studio artists, one that can form friendships, as well as create opportunities for critical thinking.
Detail of Untitled by Mikael Pluhar
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House Flies Hallie Ayres In the second century CE, the philosopher Lucian of Samosata penned “In Praise of the Fly,” a twelve-part essay lauding the physiological marvels and mythological origins of the common fly. While Lucian’s essay may have contained notes of satire meant to ridicule Sophist lines of reasoning, the fly does deserve its own praise, outside of Lucian’s intellectual agenda. The average person most likely cannot name the societal conditions of ancient Samosata or, for that matter, where Samosata was located (present-day Turkey), but the flies are still here, buzzing around our homes and nibbling on our meals. Throughout much of art and culture, flies have been used as metaphors because their existence serves as a continuous and omnipresent reference point. Victorian-era women used to wear flies trapped in amber as jewels around necklaces to ward off allergies, fever, and asthma. In still life and genre scene paintings from European Renaissance and Baroque periods, flies served as reminders of life’s transience, often signaling impending putrefaction. It’s clear that the fly has been and can be easily undervalued and neglected, but it’s sometimes also imbued with otherworldly capabilities, elevating something seemingly unworthy to the realm of the transcendent rather than dismissing their significance on the basis of their ubiquity and annoyance. If we were to be so kind as to grant flies the grand veneration they may deserve, we might end up with installations of Elle Fan’s Fly House permeating our public and private spheres and built in protection and celebration of the little insect. On the afternoon I went to visit Elle in the sculpture studio, she explained that her Fly House was an attempt to transform the material of the work into the subject itself. She had been exploring flypaper as a medium after seeing it in the Chinese countryside and German kitchens. To turn flypaper from material into subject, she conjectured, would require the flypaper to play an active role, which would require the participation of flies. Rather than allowing the flypaper to serve its conventional role of entrapping unsuspecting flies, which are naturally drawn to the flypaper’s yellow color, Fly House transforms the otherwise harmful material into an imposed site of solace for the flies. The interior of the house is constructed of plastic, while the flypaper is adhered onto all exterior surface areas. Inside, a handful of fruit flies have made the house their home: Elle provides them with nutritious meals of sugar water and replenishes the stock of flies as they die after their two week life expectancies. The flies, sourced from a biology professor who studies the insects, spend their time in the house eating, sleeping, flying, and, most importantly, mating. Elle contends that Fly House is “the safest place for them to live as a private family and produce the next generation. They can’t leave the house, but they have everything they could need, and the flypaper on the outside refuses the entrance of anything else into the space.” In our conversation, Elle noted that she does feel slightly strange using live creatures in her work, but “they would die so much more quickly if they were out of the safe space.”
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Installation view of Untitled by Elle Fan
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Elle Fan, Fly House, 23 x 17 x 10", details
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Curtis Eckley Does Blue (The Rest of Us Do, Too) Sam Panken
On a color-spattered wooden bench in his tiny New Hackensack studio, Curtis Eckley has arranged an altar to his process: a repurposed can of Roasted Yellow Peppers from which sprouts a handful of brushes turned upside down to dry, masking tape placed just so, and a small and clean ceramic figure of the Virgin Mary. Upon arrival in Eckley’s space, I zeroed in on this convergence of items and inquired as to his intention in their artful placement. Eckley refers to his grandmother’s house, a space of self-made altars. The Virgin, he says, is mostly incidental—Newhack bric-a-brac seems to emerge when making art at Vassar—but a nice touch. Lately, Eckley has been undergirding his acrylic paintings and their contents with an outline of cobalt blue. The blue line has become a sinuous thread throughout his recent works, touching the represented bodies and their extensions through garments and flesh and the phone that reigns as ubiquitous as the hand itself. Eckley knows and adapts this blue and its collaborators from David Hockney, whose recent exhibition at the Met featured canvas-wide swaths of Los Angeles swimming pool, and from Hockney’s own precursor Henri Matisse, whose cutout shapes and deep La Piscine made an appearance at the MoMA a few years back. Toulouse-Lautrec’s postImpressionist color blocking comes to his mind as well when approaching blank paper. The blue lines are settling in comfortably and seem, for Curtis Eckley, to have staying power. This is not unusual. Blueness, in its many forms and particularities, has seldom gone unnoticed; much is attributed to that which is blue and that which is blue is not simply the color. Goethe, retold to me by Maggie Nelson who was so in love with the color that she wrote an entire book on/for blue, muses on how “we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.” Blue has held and expanded space for many, with art and music at the forefront of that movement: shadows and light in David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue, the Virgin’s robes pooling at her feet in the Met’s Gerard David The Annunciation, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and the very Blues themselves, a genre all their own. This is not the end, of course, but merely what hums on my radar when I look at Eckley’s paintings through my own Vassar Student gaze. Eyes open to any moment, any approach, within art and culture, we find a beckoning blue. Blue creeps into us: as fabric, as water, as something that travels and envelops of its own accord. Nelson posits that the world looks bluer to those with blue eyes—I promise my own are green, but I admit that I collect blue glass with pleasure and intention. I am inclined to liken the process of painting to the thoughtful construction of an altar, the holy, pleasurable, and intentional accumulation engaged by Eckley’s grandmother and then himself. After all, what is the role of the artist if not to build upon Matisse as we enshrine and clarify the contemporary subject, the current experience? Eckley does so in his close-up of a blue-lined hand that holds an iPhone. The screen is alight with a void notification, but the colors of its icon indicate it could be for the News application, or, perhaps, Tinder. Forming an uncomfortable dialogue in this palm, our collective and constantly stimulated palms, are the realms of business and pleasure, stranger and intimate. The iPhone, in this blue velvet cushion of a hand affects emotion and connection. So can the body, when traced in a color that is somehow simultaneously read as gently evocative and electrically frenetic.
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Choosing blue as the mapping system in an image made of paint is a bold move. Eckley makes it feel natural. Sitting among his growing collection of images on the mutual basis of cobalt, I find a home. I think of a friend’s blue glass bottles that lined the windowsill of her dorm room, each with a sunflower threaded into its neck, a lover’s cat named for the color as mentioned in a song lyric, my stubborn birthstone, and the kettle atop my stove. I want to take the paintings to my apartment and say, “Look! Here they are, the rest of your parts,” as I show them the bandana on my nightstand, the blue tape on the bookshelf, the translucent cup with four sprigs of twentynine cent leather leaf—the rest of my parts. What Eckley has done—to my humbly green eyes—in applying this blueness along the body or the object, is to create a pathway of conduction from one blue to another. To look at these paintings, to see his blue so chosen and enacted, is to sense and activate your own.
Curtis Eckley, Nude With Mirror, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 18"
Page 12: Curtis Eckley, Blue Shirt, acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14"
Right: Curtis Eckley, News (Cellphone Piece), acrylic on masonite, 9 x 12"
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Way of Being Josh Schwartz
Sift through the mindbank peel back the silted lens, the detritus of the familiar is boney like a shipwreck, and here each tree becomes a leg. In the window a light, or the memory at least; three stakes are glittering in the dew laden grass. Picture your childhood awash in gold and cut up the vision with scissors, penknife, simple mathematics. Return to your own becoming, the yolk of your meager being, and find there the truth, unwashed and alone. Top to Bottom: Jake Brody, Untitled 1, Untitled 2, digital
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From Top to Bottom: Jake Brody Untitled 3, Untitled 4, Untitled 5, digital
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Sorr y Not Sorr y Delphine Douglas This February I talked with Lena about her art, apologies and kitsch. Lena’s the Queen of Kitsch: She’s into middle school vibes, all-matching color schemes, and carefully coordinated Adidas outfits. She decorates her things with stickers and bright colors and seems to fully embrace the latest in pop culture, leaning into teen language and Internet trends. In the way that kitsch is an appeal to popular rather than high brow taste, Lena’s commitment to kitsch extends across her personal life and creative output. For Lena, a careful attention to aesthetics isn’t something reserved for art; instead, her aesthetic choices affects all of her artistic production, from notebooks and outfits to DJ sets and videos. Lena is a good friend of mine, so I regularly see the choices she makes with her clothes, music, and even class notes. Because of this, I was excited for her to share her visual art and see how Lena’s brand translates to her work. When we talked Lena told me that her work often includes themes that are personal to her, and she sees her art as a way to express the questions or ideas she’s been thinking about lately. Part of this relates to an interest in challenging what she sees as pretentious gallery culture. She tells me, “I definitely like to bring an element of humor into most of it. I want to feel like I’m reassuring the audience: ‘don’t worry–you don’t need to take an art history class to get this.’ I really appreciate art shows that offer different access points and levels of understanding… more horizontal modes of engagement.” If Lena’s pop aesthetic offer entry points to her work, that’s not to say she doesn’t take on complex ideas. Lena reveals that her latest video, Sincerest Apologies, comes from feeling that she apologizes too often for things that don’t need to be apologized for. We talked about how girls are so much more likely than boys to say “sorry,” and how, like any word, “sorry” can lose its meaning when you repeat it all the time. We also talked about how apologies can be performative. Apologies are weird in that if I apologize for something it’s taken to mean that I’ve had some kind of transformation whereby I feel remorseful for hurting or inconveniencing or harming you, and want you to know that. The act of apologizing is supposed to be satisfying to the person who was harmed and make her feel like the way she was mistreated wasn’t ok, and that she deserves better. This expression of supposed emotional transformation, that we casually expect and throw around, sometimes insincerely, can be really weird. Beyond the eerie soundtrack of remixed apology pop songs, Lena’s hand-crafted apologies in her video are kitschy in that they show something familiar–an apology–and make it seem weird. Why would you apologize for sending letters when someone was sad? Why would you apologize for not saying no? Who is asking you to apologize for those things? And if they’re self-imposed apologies, where does that leave the person receiving the unexpected apologies? Can apologies be self-serving and self-deprecating? Lena takes the weird and makes it even weirder, both to expose that weirdness but also just to make us sit and revel in it. Lena’s “sincerest” apologies are sarcastic. After watching her video and talking with Lena, I’m left wondering to myself what the implications of being not-sorry are when you’ve done harm vs. when you shouldn’t be expected to apologize in the first place. The line between those two situations can get blurry; different people in the same situation can disagree about what’s going on.
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Lena takes the weird and makes it even weirder, both to expose that weirdness but also just to make us sit and revel in it. Lena’s “sincerest” apologies are sarcastic. After watching her video and talking with Lena, I’m left wondering to myself what the implications of being not-sorry are when you’ve done harm vs. when you shouldn’t be expected to apologize in the first place. The line between those two situations can get blurry; different people in the same situation can disagree about what’s going on. But other times it’s not that deep. Looking at serious themes that we all have experience with can also be a time to have fun, mess around, and point to an ethical conundrum using glitter stickers and warped pop tunes. Sorrynot-sorry is undeniably catchier, snarkier and more fun than a drawn out apology. And sometime you are rightly sorry-not-sorry. This year Lena and I worked at WVKR together, where it was not uncommon for Lena to send me a “sry running late, forgot my charger!” text at the start of a meeting. There’s a way that her video invited a familiar turned unfamiliar feeling of hearing Lena apologize. After our meetings I would tune in to Lena’s radio show and listen to her DJ sets. Lena DJs with real care and talent, blending familiar hooks with deep cuts into something original, catchy, and danceable. In that same way, what I saw in “Sincerest Apologies” was expected, familiar, and still profound–a friend’s work that I was glad to tune into.
Set piece from Sincerest Apologies by Lena Redford
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Reflection on the Paintings of Diana Guo Evelyn Frick
The simple exuberance of the urban landscape, Bright, shooting upwards and exploding in pastel. Geometric, passing forward from nothing Towards the third dimension and on to the yet-to-bediscovered fifth. You love her as she loves you. She’s a collage, an amalgamation of all the parts, Broken, hidden, afraid, hiding in the corners, Waiting to be found, That are scattered and lost; She’s a woven quilt of metropolitan paradise. All that is marvelous and glittering, located on every street corner and every streetlamp, All of this and more, Comes together into one nexus. Do you see how happy she looks? Do you see the way her eyes glisten; Like scraps of fabric and neon cellophane? Her ecstasy, her undeniable elation Is all that ever was or ever will be, Twirling in the effervescent day-scape.
Diana Guo, Rising Apart From, 2'6" x 7'6", oil, acrylic, ink
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Diana Guo, I Saw Something Hard To Remember, acrylic, plastic, ink, glass, mixed media
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Diana Guo, Heterotopia, ink, acrylic, collage, plastic mixed media
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G
riffin & Jude
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G
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G
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Jude Costello, Untitled 1, 11 x 14"
Untitled 2, 8 x 12"
Untitled 3, 9 x 12.5"
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Untitled 4, 11 x 14"
Untitled 5, 18 x 24"
Untitled 6, 11.5 x 14" Untitled 7, 44 x 44 x 8"
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Time and Space in the Work of Paige Auerbach Morgan Williams
Large, colorful, and inventive, Paige Auerbach’s work offers an approach to art dedicated to materiality. Auerbach describes this commitment to object as an exposing of process, allowing for a demystification of her work. In keeping with her mission, each work within Auerbach’s oeuvre lays certain elements bare, whether in the visible brush strokes of her paintings or the uncovered chicken wire that gives structure to her sculptures. At the same time, the massive scale of her work surrounds the viewer, enveloping them within the artistic process.
Remnants, painted in March and April of 2018, dominates Auerbach’s studio in New Hackensack. Approximately
5 by 11 feet, the massive scale of this work recalls that of mid-century American abstract expressionism. Painted from the perspective as though the viewer were looking down at a meal, the scale challenges this view by dwarfing the viewer. A small piece of lettuce grows to the size of a child, the plate larger than a person. These issues of scale leave the viewer wondering who they are not only in relation to this work, but who they are in relation to the world around them?
Paige Auerbach, Remnants, 4 x 11'
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Auerbach’s next work, 16 hours x Pink Yarn, created in May and December 2017, celebrates materiality and temporality. Each individual strand of yarn is revealed as one component of the larger work, reminding the viewer of how small amounts of material work to create the final structure. At the same time, leaving strands and structural components of the work visible recalls not only the process as a whole, but the hours of labor required as each bit of yarn is spun around the chicken wire. This aspect is also made evident by the use of both red and purple yarn, allowing for a building up of color.
Paige Auerbach, 16 Hours x Pink Yarn, 3'6" x 6'
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Finally, Auerbach’s Open Up and Come on In from November 2017 combines her interests in scale and material by creating a work that the viewer physically interacts with. While Remnants approaches the viewer’s space through scale as 16 hours x Pink Yarn does with time and material, Open Up and Come on In represents all three elements as the viewer uncovers each successive shower curtain. Inspired by the act of flipping through pages in a book, Auerbach amplifies this experience by applying it to a large scale work. The act of revealing each curtain plays with the aspect of time within art in a different way than in 16 hours x Pink Yarn. Rather than time through the labor of the artist, the time is expressed through the interaction of the viewer, in which the viewer themselves inhabits the time of the work.
Above and Across: Paige Auerbach, Open Up and Come on In, steel, curtains, two details
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Texture as Medium Josh Horneff When I ask Mikael Pluhar about their newest medium of choice, I don’t get told, I get shown—a large, citrusyellow skein of thick, wooly yarn. “The softest possible yarn I’d want to work with,” they tell me, as I catch the other skeins of pinks, purples, and reds thrown my way. Soft is an understatement. I get caught up in holding all the yarn when a giant bin has suddenly been unearthed in the small, graphite-covered studio. Fabric begins to fly and there’s softness in the air, gauzy cloth and shimmery gossamer—somehow softer than the yarn preceding it. Pluhar’s soft chuckle intermingles with the flying fabric. Together we fawn over a pink triangle that looks like an impossible material mix of felt and tulle. Pluhar turns the scrap over, pink on one side and yellow on the other, and passes it to me. The side that has been spray-painted yellow has made the fabric rough, brittle to the touch, soft in the way a calloused finger feels as it heals. Seemingly delicate, surprisingly uncomfortable to run my fingers over, the texture is what shocks me most. Texture is Pluhar’s medium. That shock of coarse-yet-tender haptic interactions permeates their work. Pluhar’s three most recent works share this play between the visibly tender and texturally unexpected. A viewer may sense this play from afar but cannot fully grasp it without touching the carefully cultivated textured surfaces. The etiquette of viewing limits their understanding, for, as we all know, you’re not supposed to touch the works of art. Pluhar makes work that explore touch and texture even though no viewer is privy to that touch, cultivating an immediate contradiction between the conventions of art interaction and the work itself. In the oldest of the three works, an amorphous form sits on a sandy, gray-black background. The indeterminate shape is composed of two overlapping forms, rendered by two distinct species of fragmented wedge shapes. One species of wedge is angular while the other is rounded, echoing the shapes of a male and female torso, respectively. The two torsos, and thus the two constellations of wedges, intermingle and become one. Because Pluhar executed this piece with only three nearly identical shades of dark gray, simply differentiating the forms requires concentration, let alone recognizing what’s shown. Pluhar’s gendered bodies make themselves visible through texture, as smooth paint against the rugged dark gray field. Just as gender expression becomes embroiled with the materiality of their presentation in Pluhar’s works, the artist also “work[s] out gender as [they] go, much like when working out art pieces.” Gender nonconformity becomes synonymous with the textural language of Pluhar’s oeuvre. The viewer’s tendency to define an artwork’s texture without actually touching it mirrors the popular tendency to verify a person’s gender just by sight. Since anyone viewing these tactile works can never truly define how they’d feel without being able to touch them, Pluhar’s painting acts as a tool to embody an undefinable moment of presentation within the artist themself.
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Pluhar’s next piece continues to use texture as the point of entry into a painting. Remarkably, color seems to act as a texture of its own within this piece. Color competes with zones that rely on their lack of color to define their textures more clearly, from the chalkboard-esque bars in the upper left, to the thick, ovoid corners of the upper right, to the the large swath of asphalt in the lower left. The emphasis on texture in these muted areas rubs off on the brightly colored painted bands in the lower right, which acquire a subtle textural attitude of their own. The painting’s varied elements achieve an overall coherence through breadth and balance of Pluhar’s overwhelming textural palette; however, formal textural harmony fails to subdue the thick arc of yarn cuts horizontally across the canvas, screaming out to be touched. If Pluhar is making a statement about queer embodiment of gender non-conformity through their textures, there’s hardly a more direct way to do that than making a fuzzy rainbow leap across a canvas. One would think that this move would be crass or too on the nose, but for me the delicate softness of the yarn, brushed up against the jagged force of the asphalt, is the place where the texture speaks as strongly as color or form. The soft, ovoid forms repeated throughout Pluhar’s work multiply and overwhelm in their third piece: a multicolored tapestry. Large egg-shaped pieces of violet fabric, stitched together with that same soft yarn arcing across Pluhar’s second painting, echoes a youthful world of color. Each violet oval is covered in a repeating striped gradient of spray painted hearts. The heart pattern crosses every the boundaries between every oval except one, which bears the same asphalt texture that borders the yarn in the previous painting. Pluhar’s intense use of color in this piece complicates the question of how the viewer might situate themselves within the piece. Should they identify with the wash of Technicolor spray paint or as the roughly textured asphalt oval that encroaches on those hearts? Given the way that the ovals overlap to create an organic form, there seems to be a liveliness to the tapestry; almost as if there was multicolored blood pumping through each multicolored heart. Within the way that the ovoid shapes overlap and seem to split from each other cell division and mitosis comes to mind, intensifying the impression that life processes are at work in the tapestry. A queer livelihood pulses through Pluhar’s work. The textiles they employ give a place for the embodiment of a queer, gender non-conforming life. Fabrics and textiles subvert and then reinvent queer femininity as a palpable, tactile thing, expressed both in the softness of the yarn but also in the swathes of coarse, colorless, asphalt-like material. In the same way that the pink triangle I held was visually so soft from a distance yet strangely rough to the touch speaks to the inherent significance that a moment of contact has to queer people and those who feel limited by physical existence within the confines of a gendered body. Pluhar takes that physicality and doesn’t only soften it with yarn and tulle to make it easy on the eyes, but requires it sticks in your maw: coarse and tough, reliant on a stolen moment of intimacy—an embodied touch required to fully understand.
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Mikael Pluhar, Untitled 1, 144 x 96"
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Mikael Pluhar, Untitled 2, 48 x 60"
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Mikael Pluhar, Untitled 3, 36 x 48"
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Crafting a World and Fabricating Experience Sarah Chapman The worlds inside our heads can be accessed only by ourselves. Teasing out the paradoxical aspects of consciousness: crowded and sparse, material and immaterial, micro and macro, inside and out, Luka Carlsen gets at the underlying uncertainty with which artists and spectators must approach depictions of our inner worlds. At stake in both of Luka Carlsen’s untitled oil paintings, for viewer and artist alike, is existence in a first imagined, then fabricated, world. In these works, Carlsen’s creative conception of the painting and his technical execution of it mutually inform one another. In an effort to picture the world inside our minds, he exploits the power of the senses and imagination, as well as his ability to render convincingly alien movements, substances, and shapes. Revealing the products of the artist’s imagination while recognizing the mediation those products undergo when they physically take place on the canvas, these works speak to the very process of creating art. Through dynamic, morphing forms and crayon-box colors, Carlsen presents both the technical and conceptual sides of an artist’s visual play. At the same time, he thrusts viewers into a perception of time and space that is wholly unfamiliar. In the cases of both works, there is a similar point of grounding: Carlsen’s inclusion of visual elements which transport the viewer out of the picture space. Confronting the distinction between the world shown to us on the canvas and that in which we, as spectators, exist, he provides an opportunity to transcend that divide. Stripes of unpainted canvas flank the left and lower sides of the first composition, building another layer into this space of many worlds. By separating the space of the canvas into an empty expanse and world filled with vibrant life within it, Carlsen reminds us on a small scale of the private quality of our inner experience, and on a large scale of the uncertain loneliness all humans experience as inhabitants of the only known planet that supports life.
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In the second work, this reference to an inner and an outer world appears, though not as directly as in the first. At the very top of the composition, a rectangle of bright yellow paint emerges from a patch of pink cascading down from the upper left corner. At first transparent enough to appear orange where it overlaps with the pink, the yellow strip stretches to the right, growing slightly in opacity, shrinking somewhat in width. This is an undeniably striking visual moment in the work, but it is not as legible a method of isolating the viewer from their experience as is the blank canvas Carlsen used previously. Rather, our recognition of this tool and its function relies upon our consciousness of where, physically and conceptually, we are situated as viewers. The yellow stripe is a visual disruptor: in a composition practically devoid of rectilinear forms, this sole, sunny rectangle occupies its own quiet corner of the picture space at the very top. It also recalls the literal setting in which the viewer experiences it — the stripe hangs above the rest of the composition as, in a gallery space, a long fluorescent light might hang above to illuminate the painting. Together, the effects of Carlsen’s choice to include the yellow stripe serve the same purpose as the white spaces in the other painting. The viewer, seeing these elements, must contemplate the conditions under which they see and experience the world of Carlsen’s work. Whether determined by conditions of time, place, identity, or anything else, we each see a unique version of the world. While we readily admit that this is our experience in looking at art, it is not so easily accepted as a fact of simple existence that the worlds we each perceive are as much products of fabrication as they are of observation. Encouraging observation through the entirely fabricated world of painting, Carlsen’s works help to temper that resistance.
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Above: Luka Carlsen, Untitled 1, 4 x 5', oil on canvas Across: Untitled 2, 4 x 6', oil on canvas
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Tika and Jamie’s Drawing Class Tika Peterson & Jamie Hartzell BIG GOALS: Experimentation within constraints and with limited materials Don’t overthink – just do
BONUS PROMPT POSSIBILITIES: Use a point of your charcoal Do a rubbing of an object in the room
There is no right or wrong answer
Draw using your non-dominant hand
Don’t get too bogged down in any single prompt
Switch drawings with someone you do not know
GUIDELINES:
Mess up your favorite bit
Give ideas and responses room and time to breathe (this applies to the Anything else you can think of! reflection, too) It’s the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law
DRAWING II: Make a shape
RULES:
Put the shape in a space
No questions allowed
Rotate your paper
Move on to the next prompt when it is time
Make a pattern Disrupt the pattern
DRAWING I:
Use the side (or a different angle) of your drawing instrument
Fold your paper (then unfold it) Fill in a portion designated by the folds
Switch drawings with someone
Draw with your face as close to the paper as possible
Consider why the artist made certain decisions different from your own
Draw standing as far away from your paper as possible
Make a list of anything
Switch drawings with someone
Return to your own drawing
Consider why the artist made certain decisions different from your own
Blur something
Make as many different kinds of marks as you can
Go from a dark line to a light line – how extreme can you go in each direction?
Return to your own drawing Respond to an object in the room
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REFLECTION: Look at your finished drawings. What are your favorites?
BIG QUESTIONS:
What was was hard?
Process or product?
How did switching drawings affect you? Did it affect your drawing? What was your favorite prompt? Which were the ones you disliked?
What is gained from experimentation with material?
What motivated you to make specific visual choices in your drawings? What kinds of art are valued? Which are not? Do you draw often? If so, how was this experience different or similar to the way you usually like to draw? If not, why are you here?
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An Ode to My Hen Kirk Patrick Testa When I was paired with artist Henry Krusoe to write about his film, Sons and Daughters, I was initially stuck trying to decide the trajectory of my analysis. After watching the fifteen-minute-long video, the idea of friendship struck me. I felt I couldn’t write a stale academic paper about Henry’s art. This partnership between Henry (Hen, as I like to call him) and me goes beyond the formal setting of a Vassar arts journal. We are friends. Typically, the relationship between artist and critic conveys an image of struggle between opposing sides, yet here this is not the case. Rather than take up the impersonal tone of the critic, I write this piece as a celebration of my friendship with Hen. Friendship finds an additional grounding point within Henry’s film. Sons and Daughters explores the nature of our most intimate relationships and how forces of projection mediate our interactions and expectations of others.
Sons and Daughters is a film made entirely by Henry Krusoe: he wrote the script, operated the projectors and camera equipment, and played both of the video’s principal characters. The video begins with a song, “Freight Train Boogie” by Doc and Merle Watson, which plays in the background as the camera introduces the video’s two protagonists, Old Hen and Beautiful Hen, who are each seated in a red chair. The artist plays both of these characters, dressed as a cowboy for Old Hen and dressed and wigged as a woman for Beautiful Hen. The music and costume choices are marks of the artist’s personality, for I know that Henry loves the wild west and country music. These details demonstrate Henry’s playfulness. He projects himself into his work in a way that logic or reason can’t describe because such choices seem largely a matter of the artist’s personal taste, made to tickle artist’s sensibilities first, and the viewer’s second. And who am I to pass judgment on someone else’s taste? For me, the song and the clothing neither detract nor add substance to the work, except when these elements work to produce a dislocating anachronism in the film. In this way, these elements create the impression that the entire film could be shot with different music and costumes, in other words satisfy a different artist’s sensibilities, while still conveying its playfulness and its particular manner of dialogue. Although I can imagine the film otherwise, seeing the film as is, I am happy to be met with an image and personality of a friend. A series of projector screens appears throughout the video. These portals become striking and thought provoking elements within the video because they facilitate a peculiar form of engagement between the characters. Henry describes these portals as “...painted steel rods with welded flat feet to stand on [with] a screen of semi-opaque scrim… stretched across the interior of the portal.” To facilitate a conversation between two characters both played by the same actor, these screens hold the image of one of the interlocutors while the other appears in the flesh. On these portals, the artist projects a filmed clip of one character, spoken to by the other character occupying the same space as the camera. The scene is somewhat surreal: the frame contains a moving image of an person speaking to a costumed gender-inverted version of themself.
Across: Stills from Sons and Daughters by Henry Krusoe
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When Old Hen asks about Beautiful Hen’s dreams, she explains that restless leg syndrome interrupts her sleep. Yet in the frame her projected image is perfectly still. In contrast, Old Hen worms about in his chair and eventually gets up and crouches behind the portal. Perhaps Old Hen also has restless leg syndrome? Beautiful Hen goes on to recount, “I had died the previous night in a dream. I had been impaled by something sharp.” This vision implies a different kind of projection, the projection of oneself towards death, even in a dream. Old Hen goes on to share, “Sometimes I am a woman in my dream. I mean I feel like an entirely different person.… These dreams are so unlike the other ones.” This statement hints at the possibility that Beautiful Hen’s projection may be that of Old Hen’s dream. In our dreams we are free to imagine ourselves limitlessly—the most playful projections. On a personal level, it is ironic for me to watch these two characters discussing sleeping and dreaming in the very living room where I’ve spent many nights in the past. I find myself projecting my own fond and joyful memories into the video. I remember it as a safe space and an escape from Vassar’s campus when I really needed one.
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Above and across: Stills from "Sons and Daughters" by Henry Krusoe
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Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank the following for their generous support: the Art Department, Crafts Not Bombs, the Media Studies Department, the Philosophy Department, PHOCUS, and the Vassar Student Association.
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