Š Stanford University Department of Art & Art History. Unless otherwise indicated, all images and texts Š the artists. Catalog cover designed by Jordana Reist. Design process thanks to Harry Cole, Lavanya Mahadevan, Ryan Avery Arata Fong Jae, Jordana Reist, Gregory Rick, and Shirin Towfiq. This catalog was made possible by the generous support of the Stanford University Department of Art & Art History.
HERE AND ELSEWHERE THE 2020 SENIOR EXHIBITION Works by the Stanford University Class of 2020 Art Practice Majors
RAWLEY CLARK HARRY COLE IMANNI MIA GRULLÓN ASHLEY MICHELLE HANNAH HALEY HODGE RYAN AVERY ARATA FONG JAE SUNNY LI LAVANYA MAHADEVAN JENNA ROSE MAYER MAXWELL MENZIES ANNIE NG PHAM MINH HIEU JORDANA REIST NICHOLAS MIGUEL ROBLES JULIA TODDERUD ANNA CHRISTINE WILSON
On display in the McMurtry Building via the 3D modeling program SketchUp for the Department of Art & Art History Opening June 10, 2020
HERE AND ELSEWHERE THE 2020 SENIOR EXHIBITION
At the culmination of each academic year, the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford presents an exhibition showcasing a selection of artwork by undergraduate seniors majoring in Art Practice. The class that I teach, ARTSTUDI 249: Advanced Undergraduate Seminar, presents a unique opportunity to forge a sense of community amongst a group of talented and ambitious young artists before they embark on post-Stanford paths in life. Given that many of these seniors are also majoring and minoring in other fields of study such as Computer Science, African and African American Studies, Mechanical Engineering, Psychology, and Human Biology, this class offers a singular moment for all graduating Art Practice majors to be working together on their final exhibition at Stanford. 2020, however, has turned into a year like no other. During this unprecedented global pandemic, students have been continuing their studies from as far away as New York, Ohio, Arkansas, Massachusetts, and Florida. Since the beginning of the Spring Quarter, we have been meeting weekly for our classes, but all through computer screens connected by Zoom. As evidenced by the title of this year’s Senior Exhibition, Here and Elsewhere simultaneously encapsulates the bewildering interstitial existence we have all been living through since mid-March and acknowledges the committed effort these young artists have exerted to be fully present and participative in the class even across wildly different time zones. With impressive resoluteness, these sixteen seniors have persevered in making work for this exhibition, and several have created work in direct conversation with this radically altered moment in time. With social distancing measures precluding the actual installation of artwork for the Senior Exhibition, the Department of Art & Art History moved to embrace the full possibilities of virtual presentation. Under the adept and graceful guidance of Galleries and Exhibitions Manager Gabriel Harrison and Preparator Garth Fry, we have used the 3D modeling program SketchUp to virtually place artwork in the various
exhibition spaces physically located in the McMurtry Building, including the Coulter Art Gallery, Vitrine Gallery, Gunn Foyer, and the colloquially named Ground Floor Crit Space. Visitors can visit these virtual exhibitions on the Department’s website at art.stanford.edu To Rawley, Harry, Ima, Ashley, Haley, Ryan, Sunny, Lav, Jenna, Maxwell, Annie, Hieu, Jordan, Nicholas, Julia, and Anna — I am grateful for the time we have been able to spend together on Mondays and Wednesdays these past several weeks, even though mediated through computer screens. I have enjoyed our questions of the day, and the moments of laughter and inspiration that resulted. Yet, as we approach the culmination of the Spring Quarter, these are becoming tremendously trying times indeed. In the midst of the ongoing public health shelter-in-place orders that have necessitated online classes, the senseless deaths in recent weeks of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless others brought forth again a needed collective mourning for lives tragically lost to police brutality, violence towards people of color, and generations of systemic racism. Their lives mattered. Black lives matter. Art has always provided moments for grounding and reflection, and you all have gained a broad range of tools and skills in being able to create these moments for others to experience. Through conceptual research, material explorations, and formal considerations in art classes, you are able to better understand the profound importance of observation and the capacity to communicate through visual means. These are powerful skills that can be used to share ideas, concepts, beliefs, principles, and values. Now more than ever, be empowered to be active and engaged forces for good. Use your unique abilities as artists to build, sustain, and support the multiple communities you all are a part of and to record, correct, beautify, and reflect on what a better world might be. This is an unparalleled moment for profound transformation. Tell your stories. Share stories from your communities. Continue to be here. Continue to be present and participative even if you are elsewhere. Continue to inspire and lead us to a more hopeful and just future. We look forward to hearing and seeing more from all of you.
Kevin B. Chen Instructor, ARTSTUDI 249: Advanced Undergraduate Seminar Artist and Independent Curator
RAWLEY CLARK ART PRACTICE, WITH HONORS AND AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES MINOR
Through drawing, painting, and sculpture with bold uses of color and composition, my work draws on personal and cultural identities as a queer African American person living in Northern California and frequently touches on subjects of femininity, touch, and consumption. My practice is centered around the connections between nature and the body, interdisciplinary creation, and community. I am inspired by bright colors, magic, Black culture, and the vastness of the universe. My paintings consider my relationship to Blackness and beauty and how this has changed and stayed the same over time. By juxtaposing snippets of The Skin I’m In, A Poem About My Black by Jennifer Aseidy, I examine familiar concepts of black culture and revisit a piece I created my freshman year at Stanford. In my larger painting, I explore the Black body and Earth, and the ways that love leads to growth and lightness.
rawleyclark.com | @rawlzzzart
With Love To Help You Grow, 2020 Mixed media painting, 48” x 36”
Loving the Skin That I’m In, 2020 Mixed media painting, 20” x 16” each (triptych)
HARRY COLE ART PRACTICE, WITH HONORS AND ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN MINOR
My work blurs the boundaries between photography and painting. In my process-based practice, I layer different techniques of markmaking on prints before rephotographing them, compressing time, space, and material. I distort the visual language of both maps and architectural drawings, creating spaces embedded with a personal and cultural history. While I incorporate abstraction in my work to evoke feelings of indecipherability and displacement, abstraction also helps me question tools and actions which name, measure, or pin down.
harry-cole.com | @harry.sun
Sylvie, 2020 Digital inkjet print, 30” x 20”
Sylvie (detail), 2020 Digital inkjet print, 30” x 20”
IMANNI MIA GRULLÓN ART PRACTICE
I am a Dominican-American multimedia, visual artist, and photographer who explores representations of identity, particularly sexuality, gender, and social-cultural identity, often in dramatic and satirical ways. Much of my work displays the diversity of drag performance that is so often not depicted in media — drag as a form of expression, a performance that exaggerates, defies, and questions gender and identity. My work also destigmatizes, reconstructs, and normalizes topics and conversations related to menstruation, nudity, women and body hair, depression and anxiety, homelessness, and body positivity. In addition to photography, I am a printmaker, t-shirt designer, and writer — mostly fiction, poetry, sketch comedy, and experimental essays. Can you imagine a genderless world? Or what if the elders of early civilization, in all their wisdom, decided “it only makes sense for the ones with the pee-pees to wear the skirts — more breathing room and less restrictive?” And if the female leg is so sexy, why don’t we slap some of them on the head of a fish and call it a mermaid? Wouldn’t that make for a sexy Ariel?
imannigrullon.com
The New Sexy, 2017 Paper collage, 36” x 28”
Fish Tank (detail), 2020 Digital collage and stop motion animation, dimensions variable
ASHLEY MICHELLE HANNAH ART PRACTICE, WITH HONORS
My photography practice relies on ideas of remembrance, identity, and cyclicality — allowing me to constantly revisit themes of land, memory, and trauma. Utilizing my own body, I embrace my violent experiences, queer identities, and self as a way of accessing, questioning, and understanding larger issues in our society, such as systemic violence and queer intersectionality. My self-portraits in a crib explore relationships between body, memory, and childhood. The crib, which acts as both sacred shelter and jail, provides a jarring juxtaposition to my adult body, whose ghostly blur comments on the uncomfortable restraint of childhood trauma and memory.
ashleymichellehannah.com | @ashleymichellehannah
Time Machine, 2019 Silver gelatin prints, 24� x 36� each (diptych)
Time Machine (detail), 2019 Silver gelatin print, 24� x 36�
HALEY HODGE ART PRACTICE AND URBAN STUDIES
Cities are created by people and evolve constantly as we alter and reproduce them. This means that moments and even places in cities are unavoidably transient. My art captures these fleeting moments and ephemeral spaces to memorialize places and people that exist that are bound to change in the face of a city’s evolution. From bands performing in dive bars to marches towards City Hall to people wandering on the street, I explore how cities shape interactions, movements and inequalities even as the cities themselves change. This diptych looks at the same street corner 10 years apart. As time passes between the two paintings, graffiti writing is abated, buildings are torn down, new ones are built and murals populate new walls. Yet a lampost, a hotel, and a tree remain untouched by the passage of time. As time passes how does a neighborhood preserve its character? How does its form remold and reshape? How might street art reflect these changes?
haleyhodge.wixsite.com/hodgepodge-of-art
Remolding 415 Valencia, 2020 Oil on canvas, 36” x 48” each (diptych)
Remolding 415 Valencia (detail), 2020 Oil on canvas, 36� x 48�
RYAN AVERY ARATA FONG JAE ART PRACTICE + CS JOINT MAJOR
I’m interested in the intentionality demanded by the way digital postprocessing alters the feelings elicited by a photograph, and particularly fascinated by how unconventional physical manifestations of digital photography transforms the experience of interacting with it. My interdisciplinarity stems from integration with printmaking, collage, computer programming, and bookmaking to extend the visual power of the image. I photograph everything in my environment as it happens, and it’s most gratifying when I catch the extraordinariness of ordinary life — in nature, the street, and communities. Nothing is more important to me than conveying the hopes, dreams, and struggles of those who the fine art world is not built for. The greater project of arriving here has been that of overcoming. Sacramento and Stanford are 126 miles and a world apart. These differences brought a young life’s greatest challenge yet — surviving a place where life is supposedly better. 2015–20 brought a diagnosis for depression, the Milky Way, a reborn passion for unique hometown cultures, and fine art into my life, where they shall stay until its end.
ryanjae.com | @ryanajae
Stanford Senior Survey I through IV, 2020 Digital screenshots, 6” x 11” each
but is it tho?, 2019 Digital photograph, 19” x 13”
Hope Street, Mountain View, CA, 2019 Digital photograph, 19” x 13”
SUNNY LI ART PRACTICE + CS JOINT MAJOR
Technology plays a role in almost every aspect of our lives. Yet, our world is a physical place with physical objects we can touch and feel. I find sacredness in maintaining this physicality, but also a strong pull toward the digital. I’m a multidisciplinary artist, and I work in painting, drawing, and sculpture. Through my pieces, I strive to redefine what is possible when intertwining the physical and the digital, and I investigate how the two realms affect our view of the world. My recent work places importance on viewership and perception, as I believe the boundaries between the physical and digital are becoming harder to delineate. Where and when do the two begin to morph? Where does the line between the two start to vanish? I use my art to explore the interactions, overlaps, and differences between the two worlds. I explore the relationship between the digital and the physical through an investigation of leaves. By using a combination of digital painting to visualize the leaf blade and code to create the vein patterns, I reveal the algorithmic nature of plant growth. Each piece results from the inputting of different parameters into a venation algorithm, simulating the effect of different variables such as the amount of sunlight on the growth of leaves.
sunnyxrli.wixsite.com/sunnys-portfolio
Binary Leaves (Leaf 4: number_initial_sources = 1, vein_removal_threshold = 0.75), (detail), 2020 Digital painting and generative 3D modeling, 32� x 18�
Left: Binary Leaves (Leaf 1: number_initial_sources = 3, vein_removal_threshold = 1.2), 2020 Right: Binary Leaves (Leaf 2: number_initial_sources = 7, vein_removal_threshold = 0.25), 2020 Digital painting and generative 3D modeling, 32� x 18� each
Left: Binary Leaves (Leaf 3: number_initial_sources = 1, vein_removal_threshold = 1.0), 2020 Right: Binary Leaves (Leaf 4: number_initial_sources = 1, vein_removal_threshold = 0.75), 2020 Digital painting and generative 3D modeling, 32� x 18� each
LAVANYA MAHADEVAN ART PRACTICE AND GERMAN STUDIES MINOR
Through my active collection and manipulation of time, I construct my own reality, somewhere between past, present, and future. My practice is centered around redefining ideas that are so often thought of as definite. My work manipulates and refashions collective memories, generally drawing on accumulated iconography, traditions, artifacts and rituals from the 1940s—1970s. Though I traverse a variety of techniques and materials, my work is consistently tied to ideas of nostalgia, particularly for a time never experienced firsthand.
lavanya-mahadevan.squarespace.com
Top: Where Did the Wind of Freedom Blow, 2020 Middle: Grateful Dead I & II, 2020 Bottom: Wildblumen, 2020 Graphite and water on cold-pressed paper, 20” x 24” / 24” x 20” each
(HENDRIKS), 2019 Monotype, ink, and graphite on cold-pressed paper, 24” x 20”
Burning Candy (NO SMOKING), 2019 Monotype, ink, and graphite on cold-pressed paper, 24” x 20”
JENNA ROSE MAYER ART PRACTICE AND COMMUNICATION
In drawing, there are no such things as hands or feet or eyes. There are only shadows and highlights and forms. It is my job to draw them. Inspired by narratives of distress, nostalgia, and regrowth, my figure drawings are a way for me to explore human bodies by blurring the line between the natural and the unnatural. It is impossible for me to separate the relationship I have with my body from the landscapes and forms I imagine. Entire worlds exist within the space between ribs, the curvature of bone and muscle. Ideas of consumption are reflected in the boldness and tenderness of the imagined physique through depictions of flesh. Through a reinvention of reality, the diluted forms elicit both boldness and tenderness. The ephemeral quality of charcoal, graphite and paper is reflective of the impermanence of the body’s condition and remains a meditative module for me. I am interested in the concept of femininity as it pertains to the way bodies, movement, and form are manipulated. The Healer speaks to the mind-body connection through fluid forms and the relationship between trauma and regrowth. My Masquerade considers ideas of body dysmorphia and the navigation of presentation.
The Healer, 2020 Mixed media on paper, 20” x 14” each (diptych)
My Masquerade, 2020 Graphite on paper, 22” x 30”
MAXWELL MENZIES ART PRACTICE, WITH HONORS
I’m a filmmaker whose sensibilities reflect the aesthetic, theoretical, and sensational qualities of obscure comic books, Indian cinema, Japanese game shows, sungura music, Eastern European contemporary theater, Shaw Brothers movies, Marx Brothers movies, Marx, and more. I write porous narratives that open a space for the characters and audiences alike to negotiate and imagine futures, communities. The characters express their emancipatory desires not through long-winded manifestos or dramatic dialogue, but through goofy effects, tropes, references, gestures. When making the movie, I use heaps of cardboard to design cut-outs and miniature sets, hours of composite special effects work, and yards upon yards of felt to create costumes and props. Each component of the mise-en-scene draws inspiration from the diversity of films, musical scores, and comic references stored in my head. While the narrative of Next Generation Sorplecum Poseltoy is about a mission to stop the President from becoming a virtual dictator, the production was felt-covered and filled with laughter. In this exhibition I emphasize labor and love that each of my friends and collaborators put into this project. One of the missions of the movie itself was to explore how actors, filmmakers, and film lovers partake in the pleasures of watching and making cinema in a turbulent and violent time.
bugzone2019.myportfolio.com | @sorplecum_poseltoy
Some Sorplecum Poseltoy: On Set, 2019–20 Row 1: Kadin Hendricks as K.K. Slipper; Vikas Maturi as The Orchestrator; Angela Song as Mad Marx; Bronson Vanderjack as Prof. Vicious Crate Row 2: Sam Roach as Chet; Kaiden Talesh as Que Pachino!; Danika Lyle as Dylan; Hank Tian as The A.I. Computer Ghost B.O.R.J Row 3: Nan Munger as Smile Jackson; Tannar Williams as The NotPerfect Ghost; Staple Binpine the Costume Designer; Jordan Brinn and Madeline Libbey as Gwenivette and Pasakwueemus Row 4: Ali Rosenthal as Donut; Julian Samuels as SUIT MAN; Chris Cross as General Chimpung; The After Party? Digital photographs, dimensions variable
Some Sorplecum Poseltoy: On Set (Jordan Brinn and Madeline Libbey as Gwenivette and Pasakwueemus), 2019–20 Digital photograph, dimension variable
ANNIE NG ART PRACTICE AND PSYCHOLOGY
Seeing great art makes my head buzz. I want to make yours buzz, too. I’m a multidisciplinary designer graduating with degrees in Art and Psychology and pursuing a Master’s in Communication. My work carries all three, and reflects my belief that design should have spunk, be rooted in a deep understanding of the human experience, and create cultural change. I’m passionate about making editorial and commercial products for the media and advertising fields. My multicultural style drives everything I make. I was born in Australia, grew up in Hong Kong, and have lived in the US, Cape Town, Italy, and England. I’m hungry to understand where things come from, whether they’re people, ideas, objects, or brands. I’m also fascinated by how history impacts modern culture, which I explore often as Creative Director of MINT, Stanford’s fashion and culture magazine. Single Occupancy is a deck of portraits of strange people alone in strange places.
annieng.art
Single Occupancy (Piste), 2020 Single Occupancy (Cleanroom), 2020 Single Occupancy (Game Room), 2020 Single Occupancy (Lookout), 2020 Digital illustration, 11” x 8.5” each
Single Occupancy (Control Room), 2020 Digital illustration, 11” x 8.5”
Single Occupancy (Nowhere), 2020 Digital illustration, 11” x 8.5”
PHAM MINH HIEU ART PRACTICE, WITH HONORS
My recent contemplation into the depth of things allows me to embrace the finitude of my human existence. While reality and the inwardness of things lie beyond my total grasp, by incessantly inquiring into them, I get in touch with my being and understand who I am as a human. Thus, my art practice is my exploration into the unfathomable depth of things — a daunting, yet highly rewarding task. To facilitate this task, I create dwellings, multiplicities of things that include both me and my visitors. I call these dwellings “total installations” in homage to Russian–American artist Ilya Kabakov, who used the term to refer to artwork that fully immerses its visitors. As I embrace a flat ontology, my visitors include both humans and nonhumans. In my installations, things thing, fully in themselves and are thinging, gathering and unfolding, in the process that entangles and transforms one another. In this digital installation, I present the experience of a meditator who further meditates on a “yesterday’s dream,” which occurred to him in my honors thesis installation (pg. 74). When glass becomes crystal clear, it is called candidus. To be candidus is to bathe in light and embody the unvarnished truth. The meditator strives to be candidus in his becoming.
phamminhhieu.com | @pmhieu
The Meditations, 2020 Digital note, 11” x 8.5” each
A Meditation on Yesterday’s Dream (the day after), 2020 Digital installation, dimensions variable
The Meditator, 2020 from A Meditation on Yesterday’s Dream (the day after) Digital installation, dimensions variable
JORDANA REIST ART PRACTICE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
I am a multidisciplinary artist, with a focus in drawing, painting and photography. Born and raised in New York, I use my home as well as my academic experiences as the foundation of my artistic practice. My work explores the spaces around me, examining the ideas and emotions attached to place and memory. I seek to express the power of a landscape or the body in motion, which in doing so become the primary subjects of my work. I play with hues, tones, and composition to transform the raw elements that my eyes see, such the pop of color on a dull day or a simple reflection on glass, into a narrative, highlighting the significance of the given setting, moment, or action. How many moments make up an experience? How many individual contributions are needed to move something effortlessly? My project examines these questions through the colors, shapes and reflections that come together as a group of athletes move a boat through the water. The kinetic, singular actions that contribute to this complete motion serve as a reflection of this moment in time, as well as the broader connection between parts to create a whole.
jordanareist.myportfolio.com | @art.by.jordana
Fractions (Reflections 3.0), 2020 Charcoal and acrylic paint on paper, 8.5” x 11” / 11” x 8.5” each
Fractions (Reflections 3.0) (detail), 2020 Digital photograph, 18” x 24”
NICHOLAS MIGUEL ROBLES ART PRACTICE, WITH HONORS AND CO-TERM IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
We like to mold, manufacture, and alter what’s around us. We create structures from the materials around us, and we structure within ourselves. My photography explores the perceptions we create to understand our ideas of the self. The photos I create are both literal and fantastical productions of thought and identity, from depicting a relationship through an object to recreating my dreams. My sculptures explore the relationships between people and materials, through physical labor and societal contexts. This has taken the form of ceramic cones made from desert clay protecting desert vegetation and landmarks. Subtle ideas of labor are present in my work, through time and physically consuming processes such as welding. Labor is also placed on the viewers, as my works block, reach into, and exist in space. Around the world, Stay-At-Home orders reducing transportation and closing factories have contributed to clearer skies: less smog clouding cities. This project places a coal burner in the center of a gallery, to burn through a pile of coal and vent the exhaust gasses throughout the gallery, pushing the notions of what is possible in a virtual gallery versus reality.
nicholasrobles.com | @nicholasrobl
The Humming Ribs of a Demoted Saint (details), 2020 Digitally rendered coal burner, coal heaps, coal shovel, ventilation ducts, dimensions variable
The Humming Ribs of a Demoted Saint (installation detail), 2020 Digitally rendered coal burner, coal heaps, coal shovel, ventilation ducts, dimensions variable
JULIA TODDERUD ART PRACTICE AND HUMAN BIOLOGY
Through my art practice, I explore the abstract relations between the human body and experience. My depictions of dilapidated buildings and anatomical renderings, though seemingly distinct, share a fascination with the remains of human essence — both serving as evidence of a specific, distinguishable human experience. My work predominantly features painting and drawing, but I have also integrated sculpture, photography, and printmaking. The products of my practice are often the result of engaging with the texture and form of the media, trying to expand an understanding of materiality and seeing what can result. Through my work I aim to bring to life the timeless nature of personality, existence, connection, and personhood. Framework and Foundation capture the decaying barns of the hills surrounding my hometown. The barns are built, used, then left to collapse when they begin to age. These works focus on human experience and the impact we leave behind.
juliatodderud.wixsite.com/mysite
Top: Framework, 2020 Bottom: Foundation, 2020 Charcoal and chalk on paper, 36” x 48” each
Foundation (detail), 2020 Charcoal and chalk on paper, 36� x 48�
ANNA CHRISTINE WILSON ART PRACTICE
In the Lines is a series of recent images pulled from a larger collection of photographs that build off of my previous black and white portraiture photography. I document the movements and practices of an individual during their training. The camera invites me to have a conversation with the individual. Through my photographs I am able to capture their truth and portray my viewpoint of the world through composition and simplicity. The tonal range is at the forefront of my mind as I emphasize the importance of balance in my portraiture and documentary photograph. Balance in range and balance in conveying who the person is and how I see them.
annacwilson.com
In the Line, 2020 Digital photography, 18” x 24”
In the Line, 2020 Digital photography, 24” x 18” each
RAWLEY CLARK
HONORS THESIS SUMMARY Radical Making is a project that I’ve wanted to complete since my freshman year at Stanford. Growing up as a young Black artist, I’ve always been aware of both the incredible disparities in representation of women of color in the arts and the ways that the rapid expansion of San Francisco makes it incredibly difficult for artists to sustain themselves and their practices. Despite these challenges, however, there are so many artists that continue to make work, that push past the barriers that often stand before them and persevere.
Through a series of interviews, photos, and drawings, I wanted to capture a piece of living history, to preserve the narratives of artists currently contributing to the culture of the Bay Area. Weaving throughout these pages are stories of community, love, identity, strength, and creation. Each artist generously shared their story and gave me a glimpse into the unique paths that led them to where they are in their practice today. I hope that you can find something in these pages that inspires you, resonates with you, or simply moves you to learn more about the ways that artists of color are changing the art world and the world at large. tinyurl.com/radicalmakingbook artexhibitions.stanford.edu/rawley-clark
During winter, I began to lay my photographs on the floor, creating my own landscapes. By drawing over the photographs, I reshaped a terrain of my own construction. After making a series of marks, I took photographs of how these images had evolved and printed them.
When I wasn’t happy with the prints, when the lines from the pen were too harsh, I took to dirt and water to draw over them, again following the curvature of my memory as my hand traced over the scene. As I held these prints up in the sunlight to photograph them, the water would do what it wanted, often dripping down the composition. I also loved how the warmth of the sun passed through all the layers of stone and grit that had accumulated on the surface. It was as if I could look through the current situation, towards something drenched in possibility.
artexhibitions.stanford.edu/harry-cole
HARRY COLE
HONORS THESIS SUMMARY
ASHLEY MICHELLE HANNAH
HONORS THESIS SUMMARY In 2018, I proposed a project to photograph my hometown and site of abuse. That summer, I spent 30 days in Jacksonville, NC, returning to and photographing places of personal significance: my former home, the domestic violence shelter that housed my mom and brother, the park where we spent one drunk Fourth of July. It quickly, and soberingly, became evident that no image could capture a violence that was no longer present. My hopes of reclaiming agency quickly vanished.
The photographs of my memories merely punctuate the nearly 2,000 images taken that summer, the majority taken in places where I sought refuge from the heavy act of returning to the site of my abuse. Some places were the same as from my childhood: a neighbor’s horse stable, my old school where academics served as a reprieve from a toxic home, the beach. Many of the sites were new, though. My existence in and among my former trauma affected the buildings and locations that caught my attention — those images, even if not directly related to my abuse, related by the emotional turmoil of returning to a place of nightmares. Upon developing the images, I was sorely disappointed to find the images of sentimental places were flat, boring, poorly composed. Instead, it was images of abandoned cars on my former property, ripped soccer nets at my middle school, and my neighbor’s barn that called to me. It wasn’t until much later that I saw great power and potential in this realization — an opportunity for a poetic retelling that would allow my story to speak of a greater trauma, violence, and fear present in Jacksonville. artexhibitions.stanford.edu/ashley-michelle-hannah
Next Generation Sorplecum Poseltoy (NGSP) attempts to create a space to think of new futures in its paratext, its production, as well as the cinematic object. The project is as much about the pleasure of cinema and of making cinema as it is about imagining political utopias. Basking in its own references and ridiculousness, citing its own viewing and on-set joy as the point from which it attempts to engage the audience in the hard work of thinking.
Opposed to the delightful yet labor intensive cinematic production is the naïveté of the President who insists that, now, the only “progress” that can be made is force what he considers civilization on the future by living forever inside a Super Computer. However, inside the world of the Computer, the test-subject ghost characters have decided they would prefer not to partake in his vision, instead playing with the digital landscapes, special effects, and gesture as ways of crafting a vision of their own. By spurning the narrative’s purported urgency of an apocalypse scenario, the characters, the actors themselves, and the audience instead open up their imaginations to the space embodied in the aesthetic qualities of the film as the site of collaborating on the Next Generation.
artexhibitions.stanford.edu/maxwell-menzies
MAXWELL MENZIES
HONORS THESIS SUMMARY
PHAM MINH HIEU
HONORS THESIS SUMMARY Starting from a personal contemplation of the origin myth of the Vietnamese people, my honors thesis explores computational design and nanofabrication techniques to create a series of objects that blur the lines between reality and myth, allowing the past, present and future to vitalize one another. As this project was about to culminate in a physical exhibition — in the realm of atoms, COVID-19 broke out. Thus, instead of exhibiting my work in a physical gallery, I have had to find a way to present my work online — in the realm of bits.
Therefore, in the online exhibition, instead of exhibiting the faint representations of my objects, I rely on a series of notes from a meditator, who has closely observed the project since its inception. These notes, taking the form of meditations, allow the visitors to encounter my objects vicariously. I name this installation A Meditation on Yesterday’s Dream, after one of the notes. The realm of bits entangles my work. It allows my honors thesis installation, A Meditation on Yesterday’s Dream, and my senior installation, A Meditation on Yesterday’s Dream (the day after) (pg. 50), to superpose. The two installations exist at the same time, in the same place of the digital Critique Space. artexhibitions.stanford.edu/pham-minh-hieu
Growing up in Cincinnati, OH, the materials of buildings (brick walls, concrete, steel rods, and sheeting) are always present, primarily in the demolition sites of old buildings and factories. These materials, along with the idea of rust, are discarded by many, not given a second glance. They represent a history of the Midwest known as the Rust Belt.
My sculpture series, Rainbow Through a Mist of Rust, is made from the industrial materials of steel panels, steel tubing, rust, bricks, coal, and found driveshafts. Rust, natural or human-made, is a marker of time. My sculptures are also a marker, of the manufacturing industry that has left. My sculptures physically represent what remains, and symbolically allude to the populations of people who left. Similar themes are present in The Humming Ribs of a Demoted Saint (work included in the 2020 Senior Exhibition), which blends the ghost of the Midwest’s manufacturing industry with the ghost of the atmosphere with COVID-19.
artexhibitions.stanford.edu/nicholas-robles
NICHOLAS MIGUEL ROBLES
HONORS THESIS SUMMARY
McMurtry Building 355 Roth Way Stanford CA 94305 art.stanford.edu