Princeton Visual Arts 2023
4 Maggie Chamberlain
10 Lola Bean Constantino
16 Allen Delgado
22 Annabel Dupont
28 Eliana Gagnon
34 Tai Jeffers
40 Ay Marsh
46 Lane Marsh
52 Nemo
58 Rachel Qing Pang
64 Ari Riggins
70 Eloise Schrier
76 Titi Sodimu
82 Yoko Urano
88 Tan Vu
94 Topaz Winters
100 Wendi Yan
Comb Back Home (2023), is a documentary film that explores multicultural hair through my personal experiences as a Black, biracial woman with type four hair. The film recounts my lifelong frustration and need to understand how to take care of her very thick and kinky hair, watches as I seek help from family and Black, biracial friends who speak about their own hair care journeys, and ultimately, reflects back on my childhood experiences that got me to this point.
Sergio is a hardworking, Hispanic busser at a diner, who is wrongfully accused of stealing a watch simply because of his appearance, broken/ limited English, and line of work. Brandon gives Sergio until he receives his slice of key lime pie to find that watch or there will be trouble.
Enlisting the help of his fellow co-busser Mauricio, Sergio goes on a wild goose chase for this object, interacting with a wide ensemble of crazy characters. Key Lime Pie brings to light the stereotypes bestowed upon the Hispanic/Latinx community, particularly those working in low-paying occupations such as Sergio.
I have always been drawn to insects—small, seemingly insignificant organisms that we live alongside throughout our entire lives, whether we recognize it or not. When I started creating work for my show, I was initially drawn to the relationship between web-weaving and the feminized labor of textile arts, particularly since spiders themselves are highly gendered through popculture portrays of the spider as a “femme fatale” or even the Greek myth of Arachne. As I continued to create works, I began to think of the webs and the subsequent pieces as “traces”—traces of materials, of memories and of labor (both my own and the spider’s). Ultimately, I have come to view the show as a sort of scrapbook which explores the process of documentation in many forms and blurs the boundaries of authorship between the human and the nonhuman.
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Petty Saint lane marsh
Inspired by the paradoxical nature of barbed wire and the ecstasy of saints, PETTY SAINT is an interpretation of what it means to form an attachment and connection to others. A central tension inherent to this translation and exploration of relationships is the Freudian idea of Nachträglichkeit, often translated as ‘deferred action’ or ‘afterwardness’, in which a formerly unmarred memory is ascribed trauma. The stories of religious saints and martyrs are meant to be enlightening and bracing, but experiencing pain and torment as an individual turns these to tragedies and unfortunate events. What could be seen as holy loyalty and belief in a higher power can also be understood as abandonment and wanton suffering allowed by that same entity. Temporality and the projection of pains and burdens into the future through the actions and experiences of the present are a constant in many of these stories. Stories told as a predestined experience that must have happened as it had. To quote the horror film Lake Mungo, “I feel like something bad is going
“I have nothing more to say. I left it all on the canvas.”
Egg has memory. You remember.
I’ve heard many things over the past few years. I’ve been told eggs symbolize genesis, femininity, science, and more. Perhaps as much a reflection of oneself as much as it is on me. It started out with just an intense fascination with its grotesque yet addictive materiality. I would hold raw eggs in my hands and marvel as they sieved through my fingers.
Egg is my muse, it’s my favorite material.
Experiments involved months of being locked in a dark, lighttight room with dozens of eggs. Endless cooking and shining lasers through petri dishes of egg cooked to varying degrees, in temperature and time.
I grew acutely aware of their sensitivities and preferences.
I am troubled by the dichotomy eggs represented: changing form but not changing state, something about stasis and ennui. When you cook an egg, its physical form coagulates and changes, but it is effectively still an egg. I was disturbed by that for a while.
Eggs are gender-neutral, to me, egg sheds any connotation of gender.
Egg remembers. Egg cannot be undone. I remember. How you apply heat, how proteins denature, how the egg coagulates. How the it dries and hardens. It cannot be undone.
To me that’s the title to my show: coagulate. It’s about memory, about experiences that shape us, particularly in our formative years. There’s a certain sadness about it, that’s for sure, some kind of melancholia, nostalgia? Sometimes I find it disturbing, but other times it’s warm and cozy.
nucleus, but like of a spiral ari riggins
This show represents a look into my work with the material languages of knit and crochet textiles, crystal growth, piercings, video, and spiral structures. It came together through my exploration connecting these materials and articulating myself within them. Their curation alone represents the foundation of the work. From there I was able to play with ideas of the body and shopping, but these overarching themes are not really the focus. The languages used are all inspired by a sort of emanation, the process of creating a framework and then letting something grow from it –a spiral, a crystal, a textile, a design and then a mindless creation.
The relative innocuity of the question: What am I supposed to do now?
The frog in the well knows nothing of the ocean.
When I think of how the span of my lifetime is an unfathomably insignificant blip in the entire span of existence of the universe, I feel excited!
This feeling is best explained in conjunction with my fascination with old sci-fi movies, like *2001: A Space Odyssey* or *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*. Both of these, to an extent, are cosmic horrors: a genre in which the incomprehensible evokes existential dread. In other words, they play on our fear of the unknown and the unknowable. But neither of these movies are really horror movies. Instead, I feel that they are both tinged with a feeling of joy and excitement. I think that’s what I like about them. I’m more focused on the joy and sense of freedom evoked by the unknown—cosmic relief, if you will.
The blob is a shape/form/being that probably doesn’t exist within the realm of human rationality. It holds a certain power, I feel—a power beyond what I could
describe. The works in *Frog in the Well* are my best attempts at approximation; if you’ve seen *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*, I hope you’ll understand what I mean when I say that these works are all mashedpotato mountains.
Something Dead That Doesn’t Know It’s Dead takes its title from Richard Siken’s poem
“Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede”: “What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be alive. Something dead that doesn’t know it’s dead.” The show is the result of my obsession with ghosthood, a liminal space between the corporeal and the transcendent. Something Dead is a 78card tarot deck composed of analogue photographs that follow the story of a ghost as they navigate the living world. Testing the boundaries of femininity, mental illness, race, and the body as a site of both prayer and destruction, my show tells a story of what it means to be haunted and still search for wholeness.
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a tiny museum of mammoth technologies wendi yan
Faculty
Colleen Asper
Daniel Bauer
Lex Brown
Jennifer Calivas
Tina Campt
Laura Coombs
Anne Eder
Glen Fogel
Martha Friedman
Su Friedrich
Daniel Heyman
Deana Lawson
Jennie Jieun Lee
Pam Lins
Troy Michie
Moon Molson
Katie Murray
Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt
David Reinfurt
Joe Scanlan
Laurel Schwulst
Tim Szetela
James Welling
Jeff Whetstone
Amy Yao
Staff
Marjorie Carhart
Kristy Seymour
Ash Albeser
Joseph Arnold
Evan Broennimann
Lauren Fedorchak
Peter Kazantsev
Benjamin Kraemer
Orlando Murgado
Brandon Ndife
Alexis Ortiz
Bhavani Srinivas
Michelle Zatta
Nicolas Sharpe
Asante Livingstone
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the faculty and staff of the Princeton University Program in Visual Arts and Department of Art and Archaeology. Your mentorship makes a world of difference.
Thank you to Jeff Whetstone, Director of Visual Arts, Pam Lins, Acting Director of Visual Arts, and Marion Friedman Young, Executive Director of the Lewis Center for the Arts.
Thank you so much to Bhavani Srinivas for your guidance in the making of this book. It truly could not have been done without your patience and support.
This is the sixth edition of the book project, initiated by Eric Li ’18.
Princeton Visual Arts 2023
Copyright © Maggie Chamberlain, Lola Bean Constantino, Allen Delgado, Annabel Dupont, Eliana Gagnon, Tai Jeffers, Ay Marsh, Lane Marsh, Nemo, Rachel Qing Ping, Ari Riggins, Eloise Schrier, Titi Sodimu, Yoko Urano, Tan Vu, Topaz Winters, Wendi Yan
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmtited in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the artist.
Designed by Yoko Urano with Bhavani Srinivas
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