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

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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?

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