Christie Neptune Two Miles Deep In La La Land, 2007-2012 Single Channel 16mm Film Transfer to Video TRT 1:28
Two Miles Deep in La La Land is an experimental short film produced by Christie Neptune as an undergraduate in Fordham’s University’s Department of Visual Arts (Lincoln Center). In 2012, The film was given a new context, including dates exploring Neptune’s family’s lineage and a quote by Alice Walker: “I want something else, a different system entirely. One not seen on this earth for thousands of years. If ever.”
Neptune has a B.A. in Visual Arts from Fordham University. Her films and photography have been included in shows at BASS Museum, Miami, FL (2019); The University of Massachusetts Boston (2018); Rubber Factory, New York, NY (2017); A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn NY (2016); and Rutgers University (2015). Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, NY Times, Hyperallergic, and The Washington Post. Neptune has been awarded the Bronx Museum of the Arts: Artist in Marketplace (AIM), Smack Mellon Studio Residency, NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts, and Light Work Artist-in-Residence among others.
The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the second installment of the Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Series with Doug Clouse’s Gravestone Lettering. Over the weeks to come, members from the Department of Visual Arts adjunct faculty will be sharing samplings of their production with the Fordham community.
Currently, the Fordham University Galleries are closed in response to COVID-19. However, our gallery website will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the different areas of study offered in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for increased 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.
Doug Clouse Gravestone Lettering
The reason I usually give for my interest in gravestones is my love of lettering and type. I’m a graphic designer, so it is hardly surprising that I am fascinated by the “type” (it is almost always lettering) on gravestones. In addition to their lettering, there is much more to justify research in gravestones: their endless variety of sculptural shapes, their texts, and the connections they maintain to individuals long dead. Each memorial is a micro-history of a person, place, and time.
Cemeteries are packed with life and full of meaning, from the contours of the landscape to the style of lettering on the stones. To read cemeteries and gravestones requires sensitivity and humility. One can learn much about living communities by exploring their cemeteries first, such as whether a town is rich or poor (and when; a community’s economic history is displayed in the scale of its memorials), its cultural ambitions, the skill level of its craftsmen, its ethnic origins, and the calamities it endured. Also, a community’s emotional tone can be gauged by the expressiveness of its memorials; their pathos or restraint indicates whether individuals felt at liberty to express themselves or not.
We tend to think of cemeteries as sad places, and interest in them as somewhat morbid. In a cemetery with expressive memorials, the pathos can tug at you, inviting contemplation of one’s insignificance, the fragile nature of physical satisfaction, and our short-lived connections to others. While respecting the expressions of grief (with the humility mentioned earlier), I resist their gravity by maintaining a sturdy conviction or delusion that I will not be joining the silent throng any time soon. Even inscriptions that speak directly to the living and remind us of our inevitable end, like this well-known one:
Remember me as you pass by, As you are now, so once was I, As I am now, so you must be, Prepare for death and follow me.
don’t oppress me, as I am distracted by speculation about why a gravestone client would choose to remind us of death. Were they angry their time was up? Or perhaps reluctant to forgo one last attempt to exert influence in the world?
Lettering and typography have given focus to my research and interest in gravestones. That research has taken place primarily in two locations: Kansas and New York City.
Kansas In 2013 and 2014 I made two trips to Kansas to research and photograph gravestones around Wichita, Kansas. My father’s family is from this area and I had noticed well-lettered gravestones on a family visit years before. The lettering looked similar to the nineteenth-century printing style that was the subject of my 2009 book The Handy Book of Artistic Printing, and I wanted to explore the connection between printed typography and inscriptional lettering.
I was very lucky that some Kansas gravestone makers signed their work because I soon discovered the Wichita firm of Kimmerle & Adams, the designers of many of the stones that appealed to me. This firm stimulated my research by focussing my exploration of many small cemeteries in southeastern Kansas and also broadening it to include the social history of Wichita and Kansas. I wanted to know more about Kimmerle & Adams and how they brought a sophisticated style of lettering to a young, raw place like Kansas in the 1800s. Besides cemeteries, I visited local museums and historical societies to learn more about the area.
When I encounter fascinating historical design, I’m compelled to make something of or with it. In response to the Kansas gravestones, I took many photos of them and made rubbings of the most visually appealing. The rubbings are basically relief prints that are part historical record, part aesthetic object. They were made quickly with colored wax on gravestone rubbing paper, though when that ran out I used sheets of thin newsprint torn from a roll.
Back home in New York, I compiled my research into an illustrated talk about Kimmerle & Adams that I gave at Cooper Union and also at Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Wisconsin in 2015. I had high-res photos made of the large rubbings, designed a print of scans of rubbings of the word DIED in many different styles, and made postcards and stickers to give away at my talks.
New York City I live in New York City, where there are millions of graves, marked with memorials as varied as the population. Cemeteries are larger, richer, and more closely administered than in Kansas, so I only recently discovered places to make rubbings of gravestones. Mostly I have explored and photographed the lettering styles at two famous cemeteries, Woodlawn in the Bronx, and Green-Wood in Brooklyn. Because of its location and funding, Green-Wood is much better known than Woodlawn, but Woodlawn boasts a greater variety of lettering styles and a darker, more disheveled landscape. In 2020, I co-hosted a virtual lettering tour of Green-Wood, using photos that I took with my business partner, Angela Voulangas. As I had in Kansas, at Green-Wood I focussed on connections between inscriptional lettering and printing typography.
At Woodlawn, my most exciting discovery related to design has not been the lettering, but rather the unmarked grave of a famous graphic designer, E. McKnight Kauffer. His flat, grassy plot, an obvious gap in a row of gravestones from the 1950s, carries more pathos than any pat inscription, and inspires reflection on the arc of creative careers. Kauffer’s work is celebrated and collected and his home in London is marked with a historical plaque, but he died in poverty and his actual physical remains are nearly forgotten. For several years I have wanted to design and install a memorial for Kauffer, but have not moved beyond getting permission to do so from his descendants in England.
My latest gravestone project in New York City has been to make rubbings of 18th and early 19th-century stones in abandoned cemeteries in Staten Island. Some of the gravestones are disintegrating, so my business partner and I have decided to make rubbings of what we can. Like the Kansas rubbings, these prints are historical records and also images of beautiful things, made in a beautiful way.
The Staten Island gravestone rubbings have inspired rubbings of other historical objects from Staten Island: antique bottle fragments found on the shore. Staten Island has a long industrial history and some of it still washes ashore onto polluted but fascinating beaches. I have been collecting sherds and making rubbings of ones with text on them. These feathery rubbings of broken glass also begin to tell stories of our ancestors’ lives.
The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our exhibitions are still underway.
For Doug Clouse/The Graphics Office website: click here For the Visual Arts Department Blog: click here For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here
The Fordham University Galleries Online Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
Fordham University Galleries Online is proud to present Instant Camera, a portfolio of twenty-five pixel artworks by Pennsylvania-based artist Gabriel Blankenship.
Artist statement: Around 2009, I unexpectedly found myself back at home in rural Pennsylvania. I had been studying photography and had grown accustomed to bringing my camera everywhere. I found myself shooting less at home, despite carrying a camera, and sometimes I didn’t bring my camera out at all. Allowing myself to be more present was liberating, but not without tension. I kept finding myself wishing I had taken my camera with me, or I would catch myself composing a shot, with nothing to record it with.
As I began exploring pixel art, I found the same ideas I was drawn to as a photographer cropping up in my work. Moments I thought I had missed were “developing” in 8 and 16 bits. These “Polaroids” are recalled and imagined landscapes, and photographs that I wish I had taken: details noticed in my peripheral vision, from the passenger seat of a car, or a third-story window. While the aesthetics of pixel art are firmly rooted in the low-resolution graphics of video games and computer software of the late 20th century, the mechanics are ancient. Using similar principles to mosaic tilework, textile weaving, and embroidery, each pixel is individually placed, economically expressing form, color, and value.
Gabriel Blankenship is a multi-disciplinary artist, specializing in photography, installations, and digital works. He studied photography at Fordham University from 2006 to 2009 and started making pixel art as The Pixelsmyth around 2010 on a shared family computer running Windows XP. Drawing inspiration from early personal computer user interface design, and desktop publishing software, Gabriel is interested in exploring ways to bring pixel art off the screen, and into physical space. He works both individually and together with Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based collaborative fourhead.
Image caption: Gabriel Blankenship, Sneakers, 2017–2019 Instagram: thepixelsmyth
The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our exhibitions are still underway.
For the Visual Arts Department Blog: click here For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here
IN DER FREMDE | PICTURES FROM HOME. A haunting photobook on Berlin & the search for home by Romeo Alaeff ?>
Internationally exhibited artist, Romeo Alaeff, presents a haunting, cinematic photobook on Berlin & the search for “home.” The book features haunting, never-before-seen images of Berlin at night—a city infamous for its nightlife—now presented in a desolate, eerie, and deeply personal light.
Framed by six essays by renowned writers, the photographs are tinged with a deep sense of longing & touch on themes of migration, alienation, and the search for home. Essay contributions by: Yuval Noah Harari, Christian Rattemeyer, Charles Simic, Eva Hoffman, Rory MacLean, Joseph Kertes (+ Romeo Alaeff).
The book will be published by the esteemed Hatje Cantz, “one of the leading publishing houses for art, photography, design, and architecture books with a focus on contemporary art” — a 75 year old publisher with over 800 titles. The book has already received half of its publication funding via a generous grant from Stiftung Kunstfonds.
THE PRE-ORDER KICKSTARTER CAMPAIGN – FULLY FUNDED IN 48 HOURS
Immediately labelled by Kickstarter as a “Project We Love”, the campaign reached over 80% of its goal in the first 24 hours and surpassed it within 48 hours (almost to the minute), record time for a photobook. Books and prints will still be available for the duration of the 30 day campaign, while they last. Nocturnal street-photo workshops and night-portrait sessions, as well as postcards sets are also available as rewards. The kickstarter campaign runs from June 9th, 7pm – July 9th, 2020 (Berlin time).
The link to the campaign, which includes a cinematic photobook trailer, is: here. More info about the project can be found on Degrasse Projects and a Press Kit can be downloaded from Google drive here.
Romeo Alaeff
Romeo Alaeff was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1970. He received his BA in Photography from Tulane University in 1993 and his MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1996. He has exhibited internationally in exhibitions and film festivals and has produced work in a range of media, including photography, film/video, drawing, and writing. In addition, Alaeff has been a guest artist at the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, Pratt, Parsons, The University of Georgia and Georgia state University. Alaeff is the author of “I’ll be Dead by the Time You Read This: The Existential Life of Animals” (Penguin/Plume, 2011), a humor/philosophy book of drawings. His stickers also appear in “Stickers: Stuck up Piece of Crap: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art” (Rizzoli, 2010) Alaeff is also the founder and Editor-in-chief of Lines & Marks, an online publication dedicated to the role and practice of drawing across the arts and sciences. He currently lives in Berlin.
“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to them from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true for everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion.” —James Baldwin
“One can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.” —Jean Genet
“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.” —Carson McCullers
Polaris and Down By Law are ongoing bodies of work that I began in 2015. My photographs picture, but aren’t limited to, the dark mythology of the American dream and the timeless story of returning home.
In Polaris, characters, archetypes, and dreamlike landscapes inhabit 50 miles on a road to nowhere. I grew up in a working-class family catching salmon on a twenty-six-foot hand troller. My parents taught me where the north star was in the night sky. This was a practical instruction given in case I was ever lost in the woods or at sea. This constellation alluded to in literature, myth, and song has guided seafaring people for time immemorial. These photographs were made in my hometown of Juneau, Alaska. One of the few capital cities in the United States without a road to the outside world.
The photographs made in Down By Law are made as I’m headed home to Alaska in the summertime. In 2016, I bought a car to bring home to my family and drove from the Bronx to Alaska through the southern states and up through British Columbia. It was a roughly 8,000-mile journey that included a grand finale getting the car and myself into town on a ferry.
I was a resident with Antenna Gallery the following year and spent three months living in New Orleans. For the past five years, I’ve photographed rodeos in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. The rodeo is a contemporary colosseum and a meeting place for folks in big cities and small towns.
The history of photography is rife with work made by the upper classes. These visitors often have little connection to people and places they image. In my work, I’m not attempting to document or sensationalize working class, and queer life. I’m authoring what I would like to exist about my communities in contemporary culture.
I continue to return to the places where I make photographs. Revisiting friends, making new friends, meeting strangers, staying for as many weeks and months as I can before I run out of money or film or both, and letting the spirit move me.
Student films made in Visual Arts classes Film Video I, Film Video II and Film Video Post Production. Some films deal with our current situation, others take us to imaginary worlds.
A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: AN ARCHIVE OF COVID19 ?>
The Visual Arts Program has initiated a partnership between Fordham University and Arizona State University (as well as other schools across the country) to contribute to a remarkable public archive of materials related to how the CoVid19 pandemic is affecting our lives on a local level. You can submit images, text, videos, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram or Snapchat memes, screenshots of the news, emails — anything that speaks to the moment. Here is a link to a fuller description of the project. Here is a link to the archive’s submissions page.
In the “Your name, as the contributor” field, add Fordham University after your name. This will allow us to search for your submission on the back end of the website and publish it more quickly. At some point in the not-too-distant future, there will be a Fordham Featured Collection that contains all Fordham submissions in one place.
In the “Description” field, add #FordhamUniversity.
Important: At the end of the form, check “Publish my contribution on the web.” If you don’t check this box, your submission will remain private and not appear on the website.
To see what other Fordham students have submitted so far, search “Fordham University” in the search bar at the top of the home page. Please contact Artist in Residence Casey Ruble at caseyruble@gmail.com if you have any questions or need help making your submission.
