Category: Photography

BE GRATEFUL TO EVERYONE (Slogan 13, from the 59 Lojongs of 12c. Tibetan meditational practice)  Highlights from the Senior Seminar 2021 ?>

BE GRATEFUL TO EVERYONE (Slogan 13, from the 59 Lojongs of 12c. Tibetan meditational practice)  Highlights from the Senior Seminar 2021

This year’s Senior Seminar exhibition includes work from 12 Visual Arts majors who have worked to present an integrated exhibition, one that celebrates both individual direction and collaboration while inevitably responding to this moment of profound change. As the exhibition’s title suggests, students found ways to make space for new paradigms while engaging in an ongoing conversation revolving around themes of fragility, resilience, memory, transformation, silence, and song. Their work celebrates beauty, personal exploration, historical and political engagement, and empathy, as well as a connection to the sensorial pleasures of materiality, movement, and community.

Zane Austill’s work explores his decision to take a sustained vow of silence. The notes displayed in his installation provide insight into the nature of his conversations since taking the vow, moments both mundane and profound. His film traces the process as he works to understand how an individual need for silence conflicts or is accommodated both inwardly and by those around him.

Lenah Barge looks back to the form of Civil Rights era protest imagery to underscore the long, ongoing struggle for equity in our society. She infuses the form with images from her personal history and asks that we consider engagement, and work towards change.
 
Caitlin Bury’s installation is inspired by her aunt’s experience as a vocalist in a 1960’s group named The Shannons. Bury finds inspiration and strength in her aunt’s story as she pursues her own creative life, and her project looks at common threads running through their stories as a way of creating histories.

Kaila Cordova creates digital portraits which address the positive and negative emotions that people have experienced during quarantine due to COVID-19. Each image is named after a famous Victorian author and botanical collectives, structures, and arrangements, and relies on the symbolism of Florology to code the images with clues the sitter’s state of mind.

Ethan Coughlin’s My City, Your City is about exploration and the joy of finding unexpected beauty all around you. Coughlin explores New York City and finds wonder in the often unappreciated, hidden places he stumbles upon, such as a colony of Argentine parrots living in the heart of Brooklyn. His installation prompts us to invest attention in the places we call home.

Spencer Everett’s sculptural collages of paper and glass explore the liminal space that exists between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional world. His work addresses the impossible inconsistencies between tangible truth and a “bodiless imposition” experienced in the modern world.

Lara Foley presents painted images on paper and wood that are small in scale and meticulously detailed through layers of pale washes. Foley is interested in the way our subconscious holds onto unanticipated, often peripheral aspects of life, turning small afterthoughts into the moments that continue to carry significance in our lives.

Houze Han makes paintings that convey a deeper, narrative world beyond the canvas, using symbolic shape as language. The composition of each form, the edge, texture, and color, emphasizes the significance of logical, analytical choices made, which in combination transcend their particular forms to tell a story hidden deep inside the artist’s mind.

In her photographic series, Domestic, Nicole Perkins engages the constructs of the interior and the still life to create lush, tightly focused images that ask the question: how do we create a home for ourselves? What does it feel like to be home?

Mateo Solis Prada celebrates the communal experience of sharing a meal via sculpture, sound, and text. His work viscerally conveys the joy of continuity and connection. He sculpts foods that are family heritage, symbols of love and creativity passed down from generation to generation, and the color and care with which he sets his table invites participation in his celebration.

Sarah Hujber photographed the landscape of the American West, spending afternoons in ghost towns where nature was eagerly reclaiming the land lost to human-made structures. Hujber raises questions about lives abandoned, the American Dream, and power of nature in a series of black and white photographs.

In her painting, Not Finished, Jessica Sudol addresses the anxiety that results from the constant demands on one’s time through a slow, methodical meshing of painting and digital structure.


Highlights from the Senior Seminar Website

The 2021 Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Catalog ?>

The 2021 Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Catalog

The Fordham University Department of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the release of the 2021 Adjunct Faculty Spotlight catalog on our gallery imprint, Hayden’s Books.

The Department of Visual Arts is fortunate to have so many exceptionally talented Adjunct Professors teaching our students; in fact, we have so many skilled Adjuncts that we had to divide the Spotlight exhibition into two parts during the fall semester. Now, both exhibition installments have been brought together in a single 156-page volume providing a sampling of projects and texts representing each artist/professor.

In both their individual practice and collectively, one can discern a rigorous investigation into visual communication strategies, a spectrum of subjects, and a diverse range of representational methods. Further, this catalog provides an accurate snapshot of the Visual Arts Department, highlighting the breadth of disciplines offered, including film, graphic design, painting, and photography.

The 2021 Adjunct Faculty Spotlight catalog makes manifestly clear that our professors are vital artists as well as outstanding educators in the classroom. The catalog features the following artists: Željka Blakšic, Gabe Brown, Doug Clouse, Lois Conner, Amie Cunat, Dickson Despommier, Patrice Helmar, Matthew López-Jensen, Lois Martin, Anibal Pella- Woo, Kimberly Reinhardt, Vincent Stracquadanio, tochihannah, Lesley Wamsley, Adriana Warner, and Dan Willner.

Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
Installation: Wilson Duggan

New Exhibition: Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part Two ?>

New Exhibition: Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part Two

The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the 2021 Adjunct Faculty Spotlight exhibition in the Ildiko Butler Gallery. We are fortunate to have so many exceptionally talented Adjunct Professors teaching in our department, in fact, so many that we have had to divide this exhibition into two parts.

The second installment, Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part Two, will include a sampling of work from the following artists:

Gabe Brown, Lois Conner, Dickson Despommier, Lois Martin, Tochi Mgbenwelu, Vincent Stracquadanio, Adriana Warner, and Dan Willner

This group of artists represents a range of disciplines offered in the Visual Arts Department, including graphic design, painting, and photography. Despite the differences in their mediums, approaches, and subjects, their works are sure to generate lively dialogue.


The artists:

Gabe Brown: I seek a better understanding of truth in nature with constant comparison and evaluation of opposites. Using a visual vocabulary derived from a world that often goes unnoticed and sometimes hidden, everyday events such as conversations between birds, forces that drive water, or the cellular structure of plant life, I begin to reinvent reality. The paintings create a secret recipe for an inner landscape of the human condition; narrative vignettes that are both alluring and mysterious. Nature, and those elements existing in its microcosm become metaphors for a strange and at times super-reality, a parallel universe that questions the natural scheme of life itself.
 
Lois Conner: My interest in collecting rocks and stones began early. It was a way to preserve my memories, and to take part of the landscape home. As a graduate student, I learned that Chinese scholar rocks were representations of the vastness of nature that painter-scholars took back to the studio to celebrate the landscape, marvel at the universe, and inspire their own creations, both in art and in writing. Without knowing their history, this collection of large boulders in Colorado seemed whimsical, a strange wonder. When I went to photograph, the weather was uncooperatively stormy, and later, so severe that it caused mudslides and closed the nearby Independence Pass. I was momentarily held captive in this little world, mining this “world within worlds” with great abandon.
 
Dickson Despommier: I am a painter/photographer who spent 12 years at the Art Students League in New York studying with Mario Cooper and Dale Meyers. I am a member of the Salmagundi Club in NYC. These are representative of some of my recent watercolor paintings that I entitle Germination. I live in Fort Lee, New Jersey with my wife, Marlene Bloom, an accomplished artist who paints in oil on canvas.
 
Lois Martin: Throughout my working life, archaeological illustration has been a constant part of my art practice. Museums and scholars commission some pieces, to accompany exhibitions or publications; I produce others to complement my own research. I focus primarily on the arts of the ancient Americas and have a particular interest and expertise in pre-Columbian (before Columbus, pre-1492) textiles. Many of the illustrations are line drawings that can help clarify complex imagery. For instance, in 1991, I completed a full set of pen-and-ink drawings of a 2,000-year-old textile masterpiece from the South Coast of Peru for the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The Museum published drawings and my text in a brochure and continues to print them as gallery panels to help orient visitors.
 
Tochi Mgbenwelu: Tochi, like you, is a person navigating the world who just happens to be sharing her experiences through various means of documentation. This series, The Reigning Conglomerate, came about as a result of trying to personally answer the question, “Is God a Black Woman?”

Vincent Stracquadanio: The spaces in my work depict moments of transformation and magic. The rich patterning of these spaces is dense with visual surprise and reference. Some spaces are filled with foreboding forms such as dark fire and cloud-like mists that appear to seep through various Sicilian porticos disrupting spatial certainty. Others, archetypical forms like the “Arch” and the “Portal” line technicolor corridors that peer out into a horrific black abyss from a Giallo film. In these spaces, I’ve mined my own relationship to histories of art, family, and self. These lavish interior spaces collapse and extend using patterning and flatness that eliminates hierarchies between foreground and background, form and formlessness, clarity and confusion.
 
Adriana Warner: With a keen interest in letterforms and language, I use my work to articulate the realities of my existence as a Black American living in a country and under a system that continues to thrive on the oppression of non-white, particularly Black and Indigenous people. “Systems of oppression are durable and reinvent themselves” and so, I find it appropriate to call out and challenge these systems, giving special attention to harmful hypocrisies and the deadly consequences of such. In this piece, Untitled triptych, I explore ideas around clarity and accessibility as it relates to messaging about history and propaganda. Pulling from Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech ‘What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July’, this work is a direct response to the 2020 uprising following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others.
 
Dan Willner: My photographs reflect a lifelong fascination with the natural world, with how we find nature and how we change it. An excerpt from an accompanying text to the photographs, Shelving Rock: There’s no wrong way to the summit — Shelving Rock is so small other mountains sidle up to look good by comparison — I’ve been coming here for years alone, married, a father — wondering always if mountains are fountains for men — why do I get to the top and still feel like I’m climbing?


For further information contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

New Online Portfolio ?>

New Online Portfolio


Saul Metnick: Construction Sites

The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the third fall installment of our Online Portfolio Series with Saul Metnick’s Construction Sites.

“These photographs were made between 2009 and 2017 in New York City, on a number of different construction sites. It’s a largely visual investigation of the temporary phases the buildings we make go through on the way to becoming a finished thing. Their settled forms were fine in the end, but I always missed how they shifted from month to month.”

—Saul Metnick, 2021


Artist Bio: Saul Metnick is a Brooklyn-based photographer who once quit his day job as a producer to be a photographer. Then he quit his day job as a photographer to be a producer. He still takes pictures, teaches photography, and is raising two young children with the help of a Fuji Instax Wide.


Saul Metnick Website
IG: @blandscape


For further information, please contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

“Regrets Only” opens at the Lipani Gallery ?>

“Regrets Only” opens at the Lipani Gallery


Regrets Only

Artists: Andy Brown, Michael Endy, Lisa DiClerico, Zelda Zinn, Juliet Martin, James Gardella, Marc Pelletier
Curator: Wilson Duggan


October 3—November 3, 2021


The Fordham University Galleries
Fordham University at Lincoln Center map
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
fordhamuniversitygalleries


The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present a new exhibition, Regrets Only, by curator Wilson Duggan in the Lipani Gallery. Regrets Only is an instruction sometimes found on event invitations, an alternative to the more common and more formal request to RSVP or communicate to the host whether or not one plans to accept the invitation. The direction to send “regrets only” is broadly considered presumptuous, not only in that it presumes the recipient of the invitation will attend, but also that no matter the reason why they will regret not being able to.

In late 2021, with over a year of global isolation in rearview and few events attended or invitations to accept, what regrets do we hold about past opportunities declined and the pressures to attend and participate in life tomorrow? When invited to participate in an exhibition, how does an introverted and isolated artist and their practice reemerge from professional quarantine? The artworks in the exhibition explore themes of regret, isolation, ennui, and mundanity, exhibited together in an attempt to escape these confinements in dialogue with each other.

About the curator:
Wilson Duggan is an arts administrator and curator. He received his BA in Art History from Fordham College Rose Hill in 2012 and is the Co-Founder and Director of Operations at SHIM Art Network, an organization committed to providing artists, curators, collectives, galleries, universities, and other organizations and affiliations with resources and opportunities for professional development, exhibitions, and sales.


Image credit: Juliet Martin, I Hope That When I Wake, 2021


For further information on the exhibition, please contact Wilson Duggan.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part One ?>

Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part One

The Fordham University Galleries
Fordham University at Lincoln Center map
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
fordhamuniversitygalleries


The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the 2021 Adjunct Faculty Spotlight exhibition in the Ildiko Butler Gallery. We are fortunate to have so many exceptionally talented Adjunct Professors teaching in our department, in fact, so many that we have had to divide this exhibition into two parts.

The first installment, Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part One, will include a sampling of work from the following artists: Zeljka BlaksicDoug ClouseAmie CunatPatrice HelmarMatthew López-JensenAnibal J. Pella-WooKimberly Reinhardt, and Lesley Wamsley. This group of artists represents the breadth of disciplines offered in the Visual Arts Department, including film, graphic design, painting, and photography. Despite the differences in their mediums, approaches, and subjects, their works generate a lively dialogue.

New Generation, by Zeljka Blaksic, is a short animated video that relies on photographs found in START magazine, one of the most popular newspapers in the seventies and eighties throughout the territory of former Yugoslavia. Her piece utilizes the archive as source material and provides a critical analysis of sexual discourse in the cultural and political context of socialism.

Doug Clouse prints and paints over commercially printed ephemera, coaxing out new possibilities by altering existing images and text. He is a graphic designer in New York City.

Influenced by depictions of nature from Shaker gift drawings, Art Deco, science fiction, and horror movies, Amie Cunat’swork is loud and flamboyant at first read; however, upon closer inspection, her paintings offer subtle play between the horrific and goofy, the earthy and transcendent, the familiar and alien.

Patrice Helmar’s Down By Law is a series of photographs examining the American dream’s dark mythology and the timeless story of returning home. The history of photography is rife with work made by visitors that often have little connection to people and places they depict. In Down By Law, the artist is not attempting to document or sensationalize working-class and queer life; instead, she records what she would like to exist about her communities in contemporary culture.

Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based environmental artist, photographer, educator, Citizen Pruner, and community gardener. His projects combine walking, collecting, mapping, and extensive research. He is particularly interested in the relationships between people and local landscapes. Featured in the Lincoln Center’s Ildiko Butler Gallery is a recent walking-based artist project exploring Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The map, completely redesigned by the artist, centers an experience in the landscape around beech trees struggling to survive. The adjacent photographs are some of the trees featured on the map.

Selling Bananas In Ascending Order Of Ripeness is a project by Anibal J. Pella-Woo made up of 90 double-sided photographic prints. Each of the photographs was taken from the front seat of his car while parked at various locations. The texts accompanying the photographs are from overheard talk shows broadcasting on the car radio from when the photographs were made.

The structure for Crystal Gazing AmplifiersKimberly Reinhardt’s installation of ten naturally dyed, silkscreened bandannas is inspired by twill weaving patterns and Ellsworth Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall. Relying on the exponential effects of repetition and variation, Reinhardt plays with the transmutation from vernacular utilitarian object to a contemplative device meant to harness and focus the tension that arises between the two.

Lesley Wamsley is a plein air artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY, with a deep commitment to drawing from life. The relationship between observation and documentation is the foundation of her practice, and her work aims to communicate the personal and historical consciousness of place and time. For Wamsley, context is an essential question—how does it feel to experience a place, and how does the broader context shape that experience?


Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.

New Online Portfolio: Michelle Sijia Ma: A Hundred Stories ?>

New Online Portfolio: Michelle Sijia Ma: A Hundred Stories


The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the first fall installment of our Online Portfolio Series with Michelle Sijia Ma’s A Hundred Stories. In 2016, China declared its transition from a nation of unlimited labor supply to a country that bloomed with an aging population. Mostly consists of women in rural areas, they operate small enterprises supported by local governments. However, life among these populations is not only centered around the private enterprises, but supported by young generations that promise the aging ones their houses, health, and prosperity. A Hundred Stories seeks to tell the story of these people that are at once radical and conservative; grand, yet banal. Through inserting staged self-portraits with documentary images of the aging populations, A Hundred Stories investigate China’s past and its strange, yet paradoxical impacts on the young generations.

The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed to the public in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our gallery will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the different areas of study in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for more online presentations, discussions, and public dialogues coming this fall as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.


Artist Bio: Sijia Ma (b. 2001 in Shenyang, China), is a visual artist based in Shanghai and MA. She is currently pursuing a B.A. in Studio Arts and Quantitative Economics at Smith College, MA. She also studied Graphic Design at Yale University and Photography at Amherst College in 2020. Sijia has worked to develop image-based projects and used the language of photography to explore the complexity of today’s Chinese identity in a subtler way.

Sijia has had solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including the International Center of Photography in New York, Houston Center for Photography, Massachusett College of Art and Design, Kunstpunt Groningen in Netherland, New Era Research Institute of Photography in Beijing, Glasgow Gallery of Photography in Scotland, and Millepiani Gallery in Rome. Sijia’s images have been included in publications such as the American Photography Annual Award Book, China Souhu News, Vanderbilt University’s Nashville Review, Glass Mountain Magazine, F-Stop Magazine, and Lenscratch.

In 2020 Sijia co-founded China’s first junior art investment firm 1CM Inc. in Shanghai. She is currently working on the brand marketing team at Universal Studio Beijing.


Michelle Siji Ma Website
Instagram: @michelle_sijiama


For further information, please contact Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.