Dear Visual Arts Majors, Minors, Professors, Administrators, and Cinema Lovers,
Each season, we ask professors in the Visual Arts Program to present significant films to the Fordham community. At screenings, we enjoy pizza together, watch a movie, and then discuss it afterward. So, we invite you to step outside your regular streaming queue, experience something different, and join our community of merry cinephiles throughout the semester. The series is called Professor Pix, and it’s a visual and auditory blast—so join us—and bring your friends!
With La Dolce Vita (the Sweet Life), Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini vividly described the journeys of a protagonist through the vortex of 1960s socialites in Rome. With Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 homage, The Great Beauty, the meanings and messages are updated for a new generation. On Wednesday, March 6th, at 6:30, the Professor Connections Program and the Visual Arts Program will co-sponsor the first Rose Hill Edition of Professor Pix! with Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, selected by Professor Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
Sorrentino stated that one of the inspirations for his movie was the statement by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert that he wished to write a novel about nothing. “By ‘nothing,’ he meant the rumors and gossip, the thousand ways we have of wasting time, the things that irritate us or delight us but that are so short-lived that they make us doubt the meaning of life. That ‘nothing’ makes up many people’s entire lives.” Sorrentino also wanted to depict “the great thing about life, the fact that you can be surprised by something that you’d decided was vulgar and wretched, and then suddenly what is vulgar and wretched reveals its own entirely unexpected grace.”
How could a film supposedly about nothing be so captivating and full of grace, you ask? Come find out.
Wednesday, March 6th, at 6:30, Rose Hill Campus, Keating Lower Level Visual Arts Studio B08.
Pizza and camaraderie courtesy of the Professor Connections Program and Visual Arts.
The Fordham University Visual Arts Program would like to announce this memorial exhibition, The Muse was Life; the Medium Was Film: Films by our charming resident contrarian Ross McLaren and his students in our Lincoln Center Visual Arts Complex Susan Lipani gallery.
Ross McLaren died in November of 2023, days short of his 70th birthday, after suffering a stroke earlier in the summer. Ross was a Canadian-born filmmaker, curator, colleague, teacher, and mentor living in New York who taught at Fordham University since 1986. This memorial exhibition highlights Ross’ dedication to the film medium and his influence on generations of Fordham University film & video students.
We miss his presence and take solace in the many memories he leaves behind. If Ross were here today, he would be holding court, telling stories, quick to share a toast, and likely one of the last to leave. There was only one Ross, unique as each of his films. In life, there is an endless continuation of frames; we thank Ross for sharing the ones he pulled from it.
Three monitors in the gallery space present Ross’ work. On monitor #1 is his infamous 1977 (27.75 min) film Crash ‘n’ Burn, shot on 16mm black & white film with an overdubbed soundtrack, documenting the Toronto, Ontario, Canada punk rock scene. On monitor #2 is Sex Without Glasses,1983, (12.75 min), a color, 16 mm film “starring a preverbal somnambulist floating between word and object.” –RM. And on monitor #3 is a selection of films that Ross admired from other filmmakers, including a range from Chris Marker’s La Jetée to cartoons about Porky the Pig.
Monitors #4 and #5 display nine short works (eight by Ross’ students over the years, one by a colleague): Spencer Balter, 5 am Thoughts at 3 in the Afternoon; Masha Bychkova, Gag; Alex Chambers, Cameraless Animations; Matt Gioia, Quick Sand; Liam Kenny, Joy, and Love for All Things in the Garden; Luke Momo, The Stamp Collector; Booch O’Connell, Affirmations; Glen Redpath (friend), Ross’s Rooftop Garden; Koty Vooys, Leaving NYC.
Fully circling the gallery and connecting Ross with his students are his used Super-8 film cartridges, a further reminder of Ross’ continued love of the film medium since the early days when he founded and was the first director of the Funnel Film Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
A memorial event in the Susan Lipani Gallery will occur on Friday, February 16, at 6 pm.
The Visual Arts Program would like to thank the Filmmakers’ Coop, who provided the 16mm print of Crash ‘n’ Burn and a digitized version of Sex Without Glasses, and special thanks to FCLC Dean Auricchio and FAS Dean Hume for funding the memorial event.
Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock and Joseph Lawton arranged this memorial with the assistance of Gallery Programmer Vincent Stracquadanio. Anibal Pella-Woo and Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock oversaw digitizing Crash ‘n’ Burn. Student films were collected and organized by Slav Velkov, Colin Cathcart, Eamon Redpath, and Glen Redpath, who assembled the list of Ross’ favorite movies, and Wilson Duggan installed the exhibition.
Featuring: Catalina Alvarez, Amie Cunat, Aseel Sawalha, Vincent Stracquadanio
Reception December 1st – 6:00pm to 8:00pm
The Fordham University Galleries Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
Fordham University and the Visual Arts Department is pleased to present Just a House, a group exhibition featuring the work of four faculty members.
How do we form feelings of beloning? Are there boundaries that describe the contour of these notions? What histories are they made from? Just a House explores ideas of displacement, familiarity, comfort, and connection through sculptural installation. Each artist uses a domestic material or motif, along with an element of suspension from the gallery’s ceiling to prompt conversation about the complicated, sometimes precarious nature of belonging.
Within Catalina Alvarez’s intimate installation, a grouping of two birch stools (by Peter Blasser), a wooden table (by Daniel Fishkin), a rocking chair, and animal skins invite a visitor to watch two chapters from her anthology film, Sound Spring (Seq. #5 & #7), projected onto a centralized plinth. Unfolding in a series of eight vignettes, Sound Spring explores the history of Yellow Springs, Ohio over hundreds of years, as narrated by its residents in comical scenes: one interviewee rollerblades and reads the village’s water meters, another stands on his head in a breakdancing freeze. The villagers describe American history—their ancestors’ settlements after slavery, a friendship with Coretta Scott King, and Ohio’s Trail of Tears— among other more personal details of village life. By interacting with their own previously recorded media, villagers uncover layers of time and storytelling.
In Days I’ve Spent, Times I’ve Tried, Vincent Stracquadanio paints sequential rows of Coliseum-like archways on a bed sheet to describe a liminal space between structured architecture and soft installation; between positive and negative space; between conscious and dream worlds. With imagery that draws from Sicilian folkloric traditions, Etruscan frescoes, and Giallo horror films, Stracquadanio frequently uses patterns, gestural abstraction, or archetypical forms to flatten or expand space. The artist generates a purposeful lack of solidity and definition –as if ghostly forms are departing and floating through a dreamlike miasma—offering expressions of grief and longing.
Central points of tension acknowledge and defy the gravity of Aseel Sawalha’s objects. Lantern contains a multitude of hand-folded, paper shapes, which are connected by a system of crocheted netting that cascades from the gallery’s ceiling. The organic entanglement of the vermillion thread contradicts the sharpness of the geometric elements it binds.Passages and Spooler are made of reformations of discarded Fordham books and other found objects (Christmas tree stand, discarded mail tubes).The artist’s work is informed by ethnographic fieldwork research with Bedouin tribes, post-war Beirut, New York City women artists and the art scene in Jordan and Palestine. Meticulously constructed, the sculptures are hybrid restructurings of found books and print matter modified by hand rolling and quilling, weaving, and paint, which mesh forms from modern and post-modern visual arts with techniques from traditional Arabic and Palestinian handicrafts.
Made from paper materials and paint, Amie Cunat’s structure –with ubiquitous siding on its façade and a hunter green interior—resembles an excerpt from a Midwestern ranch-style home. Assumptions about its locale and reference are complicated by its construction. Influenced by unnamable sentience within horror movies like the The Blob, The Thing, and Them! and false front architecture, Cunat’s object contains two Crappie gills that disrupt the logical continuity of its domestic container. Window and Gills, Tatami Tan is both alien and familiar; animal and built.
Projects selected and created by BALCONY: International Network of Curators Participants: Raya Bruckenthal, Manuela de Leonardis, Richard Demarco, Drorit Gur Arie, Felice Hapetzeder, Michael Lazar, Paul Malone, Tomasz Matuszak, Anibal Pella-Woo, Fabrizio Perozzi, Doron Polak, Nicola Rae, Maayan Tsadka, Jan Van Woensel, Jaroslav Vančát, Joyce Yahouda, Dzintars Zilgalvis, Kriss Zilgalvis Organizer: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
Fordham University is proud to present a new exhibition in the Lincoln Center Campus Lipani Gallery, ARCHIVUM, which brings together twelve curators from nine countries to select over thirteen artists. Through various forms, including book, installation, photography, sound, and video, this exhibition’s contributors explore what might constitute an archive. With that question as the starting premise, the works on display provide a range of interpretations of places, events, and institutions and raise numerous questions about research, commerce, history, translation, and memory.
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida stated that the question of archives is not a question of the past. It is a question of the future, a question of response, of promise, and a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive has become raw material and inspiration for many artists over the previous decades. Artists develop different levels of relationship with personal, familial, and public archival material. They move in a flexible space of history and cut across the depths of time. They decompose archival materials, disrupt and reference them, and create new narratives from concrete or imaginary archives. The archival memory they control, mark, and limit starts a conversation in which the artist decides who will enter the gates of memory.
Balcony: International Network of Curators was set up by Drorit Gur Arie, Doron Polak, and Michael Lazar in April 2020 as a network of independent international curators. The platform establishes connections between art curators to exchange professional information and initiate joint projects.
This exhibition, ARCHIVUM, is sponsored by Fordham University’s Department of Visual Art and is organized in New York by Professor Apicella-Hitchcock.
Featuring: Lu Aubin, Alexandra Chambers, Bryson Clark, Alyssa Daughdrill, Molly Frank, Katherine Heaton, Anna Koch, Chloe McGee, Maggie McNamara, Amelia Medved, Angela Payne, Dino Romano, Slav Velkov, Schuyler Workmaster, John Zahran-Colon
The Fordham University Galleries December 9, 2022–January 31, 2023 Fordham University at Lincoln Center map 113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue New York, NY 10023 fordhamuniversitygalleries
*Outside visitors must show proof of vaccination and booster to enter the school.The Fordham University Department of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the current exhibition in Fordham University’s Lipani Gallery, notes. (Highlights from the Senior Seminar: Studio Art). This exhibition brings together the fifteen artists who participated in the 2022 Senior Seminar: Lu Aubin, Alexandra Chambers, Bryson Clark, Alyssa Daughdrill, Molly Frank, Katherine Heaton, Anna Koch, Chloe McGee, Maggie McNamara, Amelia Medved, Angela Payne, Dino Romano, Slav Velkov, Schuyler Workmaster, John Zahran-Colon. The work on display represents a snapshot of their endeavors thus far and provides a glimpse into their upcoming senior thesis exhibitions beginning in March 2023.
Their chosen mediums range between architecture, film/video, graphic design, installation, painting & drawing, and photography. Accordingly, their styles and topics vary; however, their attention to craft, concept, and message is consistently deliberate and thoughtful. Please be certain to follow our talented emerging artists as they exhibit throughout the spring semester in our Ildiko Butler Gallery and the Susan Lipani Gallery.Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, co-curator, 2023
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’sMy 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.
The Fordham University Department of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the release of the 2021 Adjunct Faculty Spotlightcatalog 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
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 Blaksic, Doug Clouse, Amie Cunat, Patrice Helmar, Matthew López-Jensen, Anibal J. Pella-Woo, Kimberly 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 Amplifiers, Kimberly 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?
Hot off the press—the 2021 Senior Thesis Exhibitions book by Amanda Asciutto, Catherine Cain, Ashlinn Casey, Laura Foley, Alejandra Garcia, Mack Hurstell, Bawila Idris, Jesse McBrearty, Elizabeth McLaughlin, Vittoria Orlando, Sofia Riley, Justin Schwartz, and Julia Taylor is now available. Edited by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock with a fantastic cover design by Natalie Norman-Kehe. 142 pages of amazing work by our graduating artists!
2021 Senior Thesis Exhibitions: Small Square, 7×7 in, 18×18 cm, 142 pages is available to preview and purchase here.
