Assembly | Spring 2023 | #4

ASSEMBLY ART JOURNAL ISSUE NO. 4

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Issue 4 Altered Self

ASSEMBLY The Art Journal of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Front cover imagery by Caitlin Andrejova | Drawing/Painting BFA Untitled 2022 Oil on Unstretched Gessoed Canvas, Modified Digitally 10" x 12"

Back cover imagery by Lauren Hollick | Art Education Alumni 2017 Developing Intimacy 2022 Oils 20" x 12"

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elcome to the fourth issue of Assembly Art Journal, a digital art journal published annually to promote the work of SUNY New Paltz undergraduates, graduates, and alumni. We implore you to read our three previous issues to see the development of our artists and our student-run journal. Our staff of 13 students from varying majors have helped in calling and vetting submissions, performing and editing interviews, designing the aesthetic and layout of the pages, promotion and upkeep of a website and public image.

The theme of our journal was decided before we obtained any submissions, and our philosophy was centered around inclusion of many subjects while also trying to tap into the current sentiment of the year. The theme, ‘Altered Self’, is an attempt to bring to mind the aspect of 'change', an ironic constant in our lives that most of us fear. The self is elusive due to its fluctuating nature and through the medium of art we are able to encapsulate it into one image. We are featuring not only the changes within artists' personal journeys, but also changes in communities, perspectives, craft, and relationships. How do we mark change? How does change mark us? What changes do you want to see in the communities you live in? What kind of artist have you developed into? In this journal we wish to highlight the many changing aspects of this zeitgeist we call ‘present day’.

We are thrilled to be able to provide a platform for our community of artists, and are grateful for this opportunity to learn about the labor involved in producing a journal. This feat could not have been achieved without the help of many contributors mentioned in the colophon of this issue. Assembly is a growing organization in our community and we value you as our esteemed reader.

—Earl Thomasson | Creative Writing BA

Artwork Grace Lindenfelser

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Kelly Green

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Ellie Cromling

130

Kayla Boyle

2

Earl Thomasson

69

Eion Dennis

131

Caitlin Andrejova

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Alemir Beltre

71

Harrison Atwater

133

Brianna McQuade

5

Riss Principe

73

Joli Perfit

137

Kait Gallaugher

9

Cassie Jain

75

Jamieson Caywood

138

Massimo Tarridas

17

Viktorsha Uliyanova

77

Emilie Houssart

139

Ripley Butterfield

21

Michael Fortenberry

89

Shani Richards

141

Lauren Hollick

23

Jana Astanov

95

Mariah Day

143

Wren Kingsley

25

Alex MacDonald

96

Eric Afflerbach

144

Grace Morrow

27

Minh Doan

97

Grace Mahanna

145

Abby Rose

29

Kezia Hatch

105

Reed Humphrey

147

Jackie Conley

30

Jangir Qayum

106

Marielena Ferrer

157

Marisa Lucchese

31

Kaitlyn Flannagan

107

Bridget Vasquez

158

Beth Itzla 43

Taylor Lannon

111

Erin Dougherty

159

Sophia "Soup" Bon

44

Lena Chin

112

Kimi Anicic

161

Althea Llewellyn

45

Gwen Grimes

113

Ike Lobel 162

Matt Benson

47

Anna Tjernlund

115

Natasha Wilk

163

Andy Valk

49

Alex Lopez-Reyes

121

Brielle Sarkisian

165

Mollie Zoldan

55

Rachel Gee

122

Kara C.L. Butler

171

Barclay Travis

56

Ciara Molumby

123

Kayla Noble

181

Joseph Kattou

59

Daryn Seiden

124

Leo Minsky

183

Lydia Mcnally

61

Olivia Rose

125

Parker Parenti

185

Lucifer! Kern

63

Olivia Schmidt

129

Written

Features

Ripley Butterfield

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Is It Me? 11

Barclay Travis

56, 57

by Kara C.L. Butler and Emilie Houssart

Earl Thomasson

69, 70

In Conversation with Lauren Aitken

Harrison Atwater

133, 136

by Earl Thomasson

Marielena Ferrer

149

In Conversation with Emma Hines

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by Eoin Dennis In Conversation with Anat Shiftan

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by Olivia Rose In Conversation with Candido Crespo

by Olivia Rose

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UNDERGRAD | VISUAL ARTS

Grace Lindenfelser she/they

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grasping, gasping 2022 Hardground Etching 6" x 8"

UNDERGRAD | ART EDUCATION/CERAMICS

Kayla Boyle she/her

The Silent Leader 2023 Ceramic 18" x 15" x 12.5"

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UNDERGRAD | DRAWING/PAINTING

Caitlin Andrejova she/her

Good Morning My Love 2022 Oil on Unstretched Gessoed Canvas 60" x 20" 3

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GRAD | CERAMICS

Brianna McQuade My process of making is reflective of experiences in the space between comedy and pain, and how those things interact with one another. In my personal work thus far, I have employed different methods of making and sculpture to play with the complicated discourse that is humor. Comedy and depreciation are often positioned against the dominant component of morality, ensuring successes in that they are able to meander between being critical and self-reflective. My work pushes against the boundaries of low-brow art, and references crude cartoon work--which has further employed ideas of making, through exploring the social attitudes of the Funk and Nut Movement. I work to tap into the absurd, and use personal culture, the collective experience, and my complicated relationship with memory to ground my work.

MY LIFE IS A FUCKING DUMPSTER FIRE 2022 Underglaze, White Slip, Clear Glaze Finish, Spray Paint 5

GET AWAY FROM ME... but please don't leave my side 2021 Acrylic on Canvas 4' x 5'

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MY FACE IS MELTING BECAUSE THE WORLD IS ENDING 2021 Glazed Stoneware 13" x 6.5"

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Letters to ME! Stoneware, Underglaze Paint, Pencil 10" x 12"

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ALUMNI | ART EDUCATION 2021

Kait Gallaugher they/them

Fake Pocket Knife Writing 2023 Digital Print with Writing 11" x 17"

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Yellow Chain 2022 Fabric and Poly Fill 36" x 24"

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Is It Me? Curated by The Art Effect’s Youth Curatorial Team Interviewed by Kara C.L. Butler Edited by Kara C.L. Butler and Emilie Houssart Is It Me? curated by The Art Effect’s Youth Curatorial Team at the Trolley Barn in Poughkeepsie, is an international juried group exhibition that opened in early March 2023 (view the exhibition online).

The Art Effect is a youth education program providing a series of in-depth after-school courses in visual arts and arts management to young artists in the Hudson Valley. The Youth Curatorial Team is one such program, comprised of a group of eight Poughkeepsie teens in its Spring 2023 semester, and led by curator Jaime Ransome, who also manages the Trolley Barn Gallery where weekly meetings take place. Cy Hinojosa, SUNY New Paltz alum (BFA ‘23), assisted in the Is It Me? curatorial process and was recently hired on as Programs Assistant at Trolley Barn. Emilie Houssart, a SUNY New Paltz Sculpture alum (MFA ‘22), Eddy member, Sustainability Faculty Fellow, and Artistic Director at Unison Arts was Guest Curator for this show.

The Curatorial Team is divided into Senior Curators and Youth Curators. Ransome explains, “We have some college level curators and some high school level curators. The new [youth] curators are more about learning. I do art history presentations; they do homework assignments based on art writing. We talk and discuss all things happening within the art world and upcoming exhibitions.”

Of the Youth Curatorial team, Jaime notes, “We're 100% Poughkeepsie residents this semester. And then they get paid to do the work, which is also amazing. They get paid the most to do this work because it's so community facing, so important. [Trolley Barn opened] in March of 2020, so we had two years of only-virtual exhibitions, a half year of inperson exhibitions, and now we're in 2023. And so we're just like, yeah, all the things that we planned, we got to do it now.

Who knows what could happen next? So we're just teaching everything.”

“Everybody comes to us in a different way. Everybody always walks out of here having a completely new idea for an inspiration, for what their lives could be.”

Cy explains the Art Effect’s effect’s unique structure: “The whole idea of bringing in the community, not only to bring attention but to encourage them to be within the community, is a completely new type of idea that I haven't heard being pushed in Poughkeepsie in a long time. Being a part of the Curatorial Team especially got me into exhibition type work in general.”

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On the collaboration process, Jaime recalls, “[The Youth Curators] have to work together as a team. Not a single person decides the theme. Not a single person decides what art we use. We have a team to be like, no, this versus this. We have a lot of arguments about the art and what we want in the gallery and what we don't want. And that's always the fun part.”

Art Effect Youth Curator, Leroy, provides background behind the show concept for Is It Me?. “Each little milestone changes us in some way. I realized I was trans through the pandemic, and that changed everything. I realized I might be bi-polar, and that changed everything. I’m still me - but am I? Now there’s a new reality and a new world.” Emilie adds, “the Youth Curators chose a highly personal theme for this show, based on the questions they were asking themselves about aging and identity, and other people’s perceptions of who they are. When we were looking at the works together, we thought that maybe artists were submitting the work they usually don’t show - the stuff they keep in their special section, the really personal stuff. And the public has been responding so strongly to that.”

Cy reflects, “Because I have my thesis show coming up, I’ve gone back and looked at my art and realized that I've put a lot of myself in there … personified aspects that I believe are within me - and I didn’t realize it until after I came here and saw all these different pieces from other people and their interpretations of how they communicate themselves to the world.”

“We try to do a bit of a radical thing here,” adds Jaime, “where [students] should have an understanding of gallery and museum standards and then use that to break rules to make their exhibitions more interesting. I try and keep “professional punk” going in this place. We talk about things we hate just as much as things that we love. All opinions are valid as long as you have the thought process, the research, the intuition to back it up.”

The program participants did the entire install for the Is it Me? exhibition. “That's like two weeks straight for installing this exhibition. We could not have done without Emilie's help”, said Jaime. “The students unpack and pack the work and they move the track lights the day before we open to make sure everything's perfectly lit.”

Emilie notes that, “It was a stunning process to be part of.

You can see how good this show looks and how much work it took to build from the ground up - jury it, have the pieces settle into place, receive them, light them, pack them up, everything. The Youth Curators do every single one of those jobs. It's so unusual to find a program that has that level of 12

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professionalism. I was talking to Chelsea at the opening, and I was like, ‘Hey, so how many shows have you hung?’ She said, ‘I can't remember. There's so many, I've lost count of the amount of shows.’ Huge, gallery-wide shows that she's worked on. Just to have that level of experience by this age…”

Jaime adds, “And then confidence at such a young age means that people might hire them at a younger age. I mean, the students that leave this program get to say, I've curated multiple exhibitions, hung them myself, interacted with artists.

They all mobbed Olly Boyer after we gave them their award, being like, ‘I have so many questions about your process’. And Harrison is having it hard to find jobs because it's hard for people to believe that he actually has done all the things that he's done. They're like, ‘This has got to be a long list of lies!’

[At this age] no one would offer for you to be in charge of something. But Harrison's on our Board for the Art Effect.

He's on multiple boards across the city about art and about culture. He just interviewed Poet Gold at FASTER. We're trying to get Harrison into politics because the people who should be in politics are in nonprofits. So we're trying to get that switch going a little bit. I'm like, take all these beautiful idealistic ideas, turn it into laws so we can all have the world that we're looking for.”

Is it Me? was an all around success by the sound of it. The curators described the open mic at the opening, which brought a deeper layer to the idea of community in individuality.

People spontaneously shared stories and poems publicly for the first time in response to the artworks and open atmosphere.

Through understanding and acknowledgement of the vast spectrum of subjectivity comes communal bonding.

Jaime completed her MFA in Museum Studies at Syracuse University, focusing on feminist and BIPOC art history and film theory. “I was in this program when I was a teenager,” she adds, “so I worked at Spark [an Art Effect program] doing the film program. I went to grad school, and I came right back here and started working here to teach. My parents are two dimensional artists. I was never thinking film until my dad was like, ‘Here's this awesome program that does film’, and I was like, ‘Oh, my god, now I love film.’” I am an exact example of all the things that can change when you see what the possibilities are.

Jaime believes the Art Effect offers a unique experience students would not usually get until after college. “I didn't change a light in a gallery until after I finished my undergrad.

The idea is to teach them confidence in their opinions, the ability to express their opinions clearly, the ability to write down their opinions — these are skills that you’ll never realize you need until you need them. It starts at something small like, 15

‘I know how to understand why this art is good’, and it ends with a whole new career opportunity.”

After graduating from the Art Effect, Gabe plans on going to school for illustration, Leroy is considering majoring in art music therapy, and Kaliceia is interested in management. JD currently works as a painter.

The Art Effect also participates in the Reel Exposure Photography exhibition, now in its tenth year, which will happen during the PKX Festival, May 5-7, 2023. “We're going to have a day of film festival, a 24-hour film race, and then premiere it in front of a panel of experts who are in the industry. Everything will be done by people between the ages of 14 and 19. And we're going to have a photo exhibition to go with that as well,” says Jaime. ”The Highs of Life is our next exhibition for summer [taking place July 21 – August 18, 2023], about the sides on social media that we show and the sides of ourselves that we keep to ourselves and don't show. It is about the real joy we experience in our life and comparing it to the fake joy we put online.”

For those interested in learning more about The Art Effect, information can be found on their website: https:// thearteffect.org/programs/youth-curatorial-team/ .

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GRAD | PHOTOGRAPHY AND RELATED MEDIA

Massimo Tarridas he/him

L'última abraçada 202 Silver Gelatin Photograp 11" x 14" 17

22 phic Paper

Scarred Emulsion 2023 Silver Gelatin Photographic Paper (Chemogram) 11" x 14"

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Self-portrait 2023 Archival Paper (Cyanotype) 11" x 14"

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End of Roll 2023 Silver Gelatin Photographic Paper 11" x 14"

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UNDERGRAD | ENGLISH

Ripley Butterfield She/her

I Forget Myself by Ripley Butterfield

From below, I saw the knees turn into the hips, into the protruding waist and far-apart breasts, into a tiny curly-haired head. Usually, it was bigger, I thought. The low ceiling-thumping, acnesprouting head. At this moment, prone on the ground, everything I could see tilted to the left and disappeared, shrinking as it approached the sky. The body was me, mine, and I cowered as I wondered what it might do. Quietly, I willed myself to become an infant, knees tucked in and thumb playing at the mouth.

My body was an unhappy one. I noted its chafed ankles and the inflamed digestive noises that call to mind a car revving out of a mud rut. The faraway face was expressionless, looking down as I thought myself away from where I was. Walking down a coastline. Sitting down in a silent room for testing. Picking up apples, examining them for browning; anything tactile. How could I calm it, the body, down?

I caught sight of the knife before the hand grasped it. My fingers dipped into and groped around a pant pocket as I looked over myself rigorously. It caught something bulky and fished it out: the black grip of a kitchen knife! The blade tore a hole into the denim as it was dragged out on its end. It probably cut my skin superficially. I felt a cat’s scratch but could not place it; for my legs as I knew them were standing over me. And that hovering hand, wielding the sharp metal, was closing in.

There was no “moving” me. There was no physical departure, nor separation- not beyond the dissonance of perspective. I saw me, and it- she- was looking back. I tried religion, last-ditch and devoid of piety, asking Christ if I might go to heaven since the death would not really be suicide.

I sent him messages, neurons from the mind to the great beyond. I am not killing myself, but my body might murder the one who speaks with you. When I heard no response besides the labored breath from my mouth, I asked him, don’t you understand the difference?

When the tip of the knife was so near, I could feel the warmth my skin had imparted on the metal, I decided to be passive. The lists of “I love you”s would stay unwritten, unsaid. That was alright. There would be no more days: no showering, nor attending classes, nor eating (I took an extra moment to mourn this). No speaking nor listening. The sensation of worry would go first, I hoped.

While being stabbed in some part I couldn’t place, I realized that this was an end to solitude: my physical presence would remain in the room without the thoughts I produced to devour the air. The body was winning, for her lungs are what required breath. For her mouth chewed and stomach digested. And I am archaic, unneeded, and with this, gone.

Entropy 2023 Ink on Paper 9" x 12" 21

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ALUMNI | ART EDUCATION 2017

Lauren Hollick she/they

How well do you know your friends? Your family. Your lovers? Yourself ? All at various stages of complete, some eyes may never develop into detailed intricate paintings.

Some relationships/eyes will stay incomplete, stopped in their tracks. Some stay closed forever. Some reflect blossoming color and complexity.

Developing Intimacy 2022 Oils 20" x 12"

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Rude Awakening Gouache 18" x 24"

2023

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UNDERGRAD | VISUAL ARTS

Wren Kingsley she/her

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First Iteration 2023 Ink on Paper 10" x 8"

Second Iteration Ink on Paper 5" x 8"

2023

First Iteration 2023 Ink on Paper 10" x 8"

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UNDERGRAD | SCULPTURE

Grace Morrow she/her

Penny 2022 Dust, Lint, Glue, Thread 10" x 9" x 5"

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Dusty 2022 Dust, Lint, Glue, Thread 38" x 29.5"

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UNDERGRAD | VISUAL ARTS/THEATRE ARTS

Abby Rose they/them

Armored In 2023 Brass Sheet, Copper Sheet, Copper Wire, Fake Leather String, Fleece 5" x 2" x 5"

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UNDERGRAD | VISUAL ARTS

Jackie Conley

she/her

decay 2022 Gouache on Paper 11" x 15"

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ALUMNI | PHOTOGRAPHY 2022

Marisa Lucchese she/her

This Shoe Is Too Tight, This Bride Is Not Right 2022 Medium Format Photograph 36" x 45" 31

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Burning with Desire 2022 Medium Format Photograph 36" x 45"

A Cage of One's

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Own Making 2022 Digital Photograph 26" x 36" 34

Bite the Flesh 2022 Medium Format Photograph 18" x 24" 35

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In Conversation with Lauren Aitken

by Earl Thomasson

L: I graduated with a BFA in ceramics and have a BSA in Art Ed also from New Paltz. I have fallen back into the art world relatively recently but have a contemporary art gallery in Kingston now and I have a ceramic casting and fabrication company, also in Kingston. The company is called Headstone Gallery. We’re in an old 1850s renovated barn in Kingston.

It was a headstone and monument factory prior to us being in the building. We show contemporary solo and two person exhibitions showing people from all over North America.

The ceramic side of the company is focused on assisting and helping small designers and other artists produce limited batch runs of objects. We’re able to get it to them in a way that makes sense, and they get to then produce a piece in a medium that they’re not used to using. We’re coming up on our oneyear anniversary. The big thing is we wanted to be accessible for everybody, so you know, whether you are interested in the art world or not, it’s kind of a space for everybody to come in and see good work.

E: I wanted to talk to you about working artists and the balance of a day job while also maintaining that artistic drive. Can you speak to the relationship between labor and the art itself and how that influences where you are now?

L: Life is all about timing and all about kind of the sweet spot of timing. I think every BFA major's dream is when you graduate you land in this, like, perfect art world job in whatever field you’re doing, and it’s amazing and you get paid really well. But the reality of life and the way that we have to survive unfortunately is in this economic world doesn’t always work like that. I think working in restaurants is one of the hardest jobs; it’s one of the grittiest industries to work in [and] it teaches you amazing skill sets. It teaches you how to multitask, it teaches you how to deal with people, how to work under pressure, [and] how to deal with deadlines because you’re working in a very small window of time to get someone fed and happy. I think so much of that restaurant side of my life translates wholeheartedly back to art and art practice and running a studio. With ceramics it’s really physically demanding, it's labor: you’re making molds, you have to mix and pour plaster. The biggest thing that I try to talk to people about when they’re either moving back into the art field or have left it for a while, is that any job you’ve had can always 37

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be relatable to the thing that you’re trying to go after. You just have to see what those comparisons are. When I started producing work for chefs, you have to have an understanding of how pieces are handled, what it looks like at a table, and the service side of it -- how people are reacting to it when the food comes out on plates; and in the back of the house, how does it stack, are they hand washing [or] it is it going in the dishwasher?

E: In one of my questions, I used the word “viewer” and I’m now realizing how close it is to “customer”.

I’m wondering if you can talk on how that other outside set of eyes influences your own experience with your craft.

L: We talk about it a lot in the gallery because people ask us pretty often “How do you decide what you show? How do you find the artist?” I think the big thing is you have to be true, and you have to be really honest with the way that you make your craft. I think that if you’re trying to make for anyone else except yourself, people [will] see through that. I’ve come to find that when you take on client work, or you’re trying to make work for an audience, I think your message and the root of why you’re making or who you are in relation to your craft gets diluted. Staying true to you first and foremost as an artist 39

is the most important part and how it’s received in the world is discretionary. Everybody has an opinion. Also, making work that’s interesting enough to start a conversation with people -- that’s the exciting part. An object can be beautiful, but I think the idea that you can have a conversation surrounding it is really important.

E: I investigated the gallery work that you have on your website, and I see muted colors and very linear designs, and it shows that you have a lot of restraint and very well mastered technicality. To see your work as both an object and a work of art was an illuminating experience. Can talk about your own relationship between art and function and how those two play together?

L: I make objects that I think are beautiful to look at, and in terms of function, things that I feel work the best for their use: mug shape, handle shape, what a piece feels like when it hits your mouth. I think that there is this sweet spot that happens between function and aesthetic. As someone who’s making utilitarian work, it has to have both; it has to be well crafted and well-made and function, but also has to be beautiful. My personal color palette that I make is very toned down and muted and I think a lot of that has to do with my

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restaurant background. The beautiful thing about plating food on handmade ceramics is that the interaction that happens between the two and the idea that neither overpowers or overshadows the other.

E: I assume that your practice wasn’t always the same. Can you speak about any change in concepts, materials, or influences that have changed or are noticeable in your work?

L: When I was in school, I was still making pots, but I hadn’t been out in the world at that point. I hadn’t really experienced a lot and so my thesis exhibition was neon colored and super bright and a little bit obnoxious. Then I left the art world for a really long time and that really started influencing me when I landed back because I hadn’t been making in about 8 years.

It was really nerve wracking to get back to making because you sit down to start making work and you feel like you’ve forgotten everything. Then it slowly starts coming back in and you’re like “OK, I don’t suck.” I started making these really kind of simple forms in the beginning and very simple glazes.

Now that we have this casting company, I’m starting to move into the mold-making side of production work and really designing objects more intentionally instead of just making larger-batch production. I started studying glaze chemistry a year and a half ago in some intense coursework and I think that’s shifting for me now too, so my glaze palette is starting to change slightly because I’m actually more interested in it now.

When I was in school, I didn’t care about materials because I was like, “Why are we doing these ‘tracks so blends’” and like, I have to make all these 100-gram batches of stupid materials that I don’t care about. Now being out of it with my own studio practice, you make things more intentionally so you’re not doing the test just to do the test, you’re like “OK, this is the color palette to work towards and so now I’m going to make these glazes based on research, and based on the thing that I really want to do right now”.

E: In your history you’ve mentioned that you’ve left the art world and the Hudson Valley and have come back to it. Did that give you any notable perspective or change?

L: You know, when you’re in school there’s just so much, especially going to New Paltz. You’re so close to New York City, everything is super accessible, and I think we take it for granted. When I left, I moved to a super remote two by twelve-

mile island in the Caribbean: no galleries, no commercialized anything. We didn’t have Internet for the first year that I lived there. I didn’t know what was going on, not only in the art world but in the news. It got to a point where I missed that I could just go to New York City and say “I’m gonna go down and spend a day and see shows and see what people are making.” I lived in this amazing place but because I wasn’t making, I wasn’t feeling fulfilled in that way. I think I just I needed a break after school to figure out kind of what the next thing was. When I left there weren’t a lot of jobs and so I was in this position where I was questioning “Why did I get a BFA? Why did I get a teaching degree in art?” I didn’t know where to start and so my starting point was, I just need to get back into a studio, I just need to start making work again, and then the influences started really kind of filtering back in.

E: Do you have any advice that you wish you’d heard when you were graduating?

L: “Take a breath. You’re smart. You’ll be able to figure it out. It’s going to be OK.” When I graduated the option was you go get a teaching job, you stay in that job for 30 years, or where you go and get a Master's degree. What I’ve seen, especially here, with artists that really have amazing practices is that they finish school, they land a shit job for a little bit, they realize it’s shit, they’re like “OK I don’t like my boss, I don’t like my coworkers, I don’t like what I do”, then you find something else to do. The experience of life and jobs and careers will influence you and will foster the way that you are in the world in a good way, whether it’s a good experience or a bad experience. Life is short. People thought I was nuts for moving to the Caribbean, “You just got two degrees! What are you doing?” I was gonna go pay off my student loans and experience another culture. That kind of comfortable spot, it’s gonna be there, but you don’t know what else is out there until you actually go. I mean, I met Chase, my business partner, just by happenstance because I decided to join this studio. Part of it is trusting your gut and this kind of authenticity. Really trying to listen to what your inner self is trying to tell you to do, and not what society is telling you is the right path or the right way to do something. And being a nice, kind human. At the end of the day that will get you leaps and bounds ahead of everybody else.

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UNDERGRAD | ART EDUCATION

Beth Itzla she/her

Spring Rays 2023 Linoleum Block and Monoprint made with Yarn, Acrylic Paint and a Gelli Plate 9" x 12"

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UNDERGRAD | PRINTMAKING

Sophia "Soup" Bon

Siting the Line 2022 Photo Silkscreen 14" x 11"

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UNDERGRAD | CERAMICS

Althea Llewellyn she/they

Vase of a Thousand Eyes 2018 Wheel-Thrown Stoneware with Matte Black and Metallic Glaze 13" x 4"

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The Nose Knows No Answers But The Mirror Does 2018 Wheel-thrown Stoneware with Hand-sculpted Noses and Metallic Glaze 14" x 5"

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UNDERGRAD | PRINTMAKING

Matt Benson he/him

Untitled 2022 Silkscreen 11" x 15" 47

Untitled

2023 Intaglio 6" x 12"

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ALUMNI | DRAWING/PAINTING 2022

Andy Valk they/she

Monologue 2022 Oil and Oil Pastel on Canvas 24" x 36"

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As They Grew to a Giant Person Oil and Acrylic on C 30

2021 Canvas 0" x 40"

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The Reckoning Oil on canvas 30" x 24"

2022

Avant Gardener 2023 Oil and Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 36" 52

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UNDERGRAD | DIGITAL MEDIA PRODUCTION

Mollie Zoldan she/they

ask me kid questions Video 55

UNDERGRAD | THEATRE ARTS

Barclay Travis

he/him

untitled: april 4, 2022

there’s a little girl behind me in the mirror, translucent and trying on her brother’s clothes just to see. we make eye contact through our reflections, and she scrambles to take off the tight-fitting shirt, embarrassed that she’s been caught dreaming.

there’s a little girl behind me in the mirror, translucent and taking scissors to her long brown hair. she doesn’t cut much, afraid to be yelled at, but she looks at my buzzcut and bleached head and cuts off just enough to hold in the palm of her hand.

there’s a little girl behind me in the mirror, translucent and too young to know what it means to grieve. she hasn’t lost anything yet, other than her confidence, and she’s too young to know that i will never be able to get back what i lost with her: there is no time to mourn.

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Prometheus, or An Act of Creation

1.

something that will explode in the kiln

someone hands you a ball of clay—

when you hand it over to an adult.

it’s not important who—

6.

and they tell you,

someone throws a ball of clay at you

go ahead. make something of yourself.

and it’s already hard and dry and it

2.

hurts.

someone hands you a ball of clay—

7.

it’s not important who—

someone throws your creation against the wall and it

and they say you’ll never amount to anything.

3. someone hands you a ball of clay, and it’s already dry and hard.

4. prometheus hands you a ball of clay and he tells you, if it’s so awful, then you give it a try, and when you do, someone takes the breath from out of your lungs, takes your life before you have a chance to understand it.

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shatters. falls apart until it’s unrecognizable pieces of plaster on the ground and you rush over barefoot to try and fix it but it just hurts.

8. you take a ball of clay and hold it in the palm of your hand where it coats your skin with some kind of something,

5.

something that makes you feel

someone hands you a ball of clay—

like you have control,

forget prometheus—

like you understand again.

and you’re ten years old making

9.

you push your thumbs into the clay and flatten it.

over your shoulder and tell you its wrong.

10.

14.

you lay down on your back and look

someone is behind you—

at your chest. look how flat.

it’s not important who—

11.

and they’re guiding your hands into water,

someone hands you a ball of clay—

into clay,

you don’t remember who—

into the shape of what you’re supposed to be.

and you run with it.

15.

you take it and run away and

stop trying to use the clay.

run into the room where they

it’s never going to work.

keep the exploded pieces

16.

of creations long gone.

prometheus hands you fire,

12.

and you burn everything to the ground,

you run your finger over the broken edge, just to see

and you take the ashes and start to draw.

what happens. the cut it leaves matches up like a puzzle piece.

13. someone hands you a ball of clay— your father, or your mother, or maybe your teacher, it doesn’t matter who— and says, go ahead. you can make anything you like, but when you make anything you like, they look

17. your finger is coated with ash and it feels awful but it feels incredible and you’ve never felt this powerful.

18. you’ve drawn something on the ground, something imperfect and dirty, and you love it. your fingerprints are left in the ash marks.

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GRAD | SCULPTURE

Joseph Kattou he/him

ANTI-LUMA Vejigante 2023 Resin, 3D Printed Electronic Infrastructure 59

Unhealthy exports Vejigante 2023 Coconut, Replica Plantain 36" x 32" 60

UNDERGRAD | DRAWING/PAINTING

Lydia McNally they/she

Growth, Interrupted 2022 Gel transfer on Wood Panel 18" x 24" 61

Papa Bear Jar 2022 Glazed ceramic 4" x 4" x 7"

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UNDERGRAD | SCULPTURE

Lucifer! Kern he/him

Blanket 2022 Cotton String, Cattail Fibers, Dried Wildflowers, Milkweed Seed Fibers 5' x 5'

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Under my blanket, I lie quietly, observing silently and I become but another leaf or creature under the canopy. I do not need to be noticed, for I am only here for my dying friends. I need to keep them like they are in my mind, for the crushing weight of their demise marks the end of a past I cannot return to. There is no past to return to.

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UNDERGRAD | DRAWING/PAINTING

Kelly Green they/them

FOOTTAT (pink side) 2022 Textiles and Mixed Media

FOOTTAT (yellow side) 2022 Textiles and Mixed Media 65

TWOFACE 2022 Textiles and Embroidery Thread 66

untitled 2022 Textiles and Mixed Media

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ethereal being 2023 Plaster, Steel, Textiles, Acrylic

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UNDERGRAD | CREATIVE WRITING

Earl Thomasson he/him

will we ever forget your name?

––

They sit down on the porcelain throne

through billionaire’s grasp.

and pull out their phones like they control it.

Amazon is a shit company to purchase from

They open an app with a familiar logo and unforgettable color

but the convenience is easy and I hate that.

but They never read the poison on the vial. the movements are second nature,

but you lose it shoveling away the mass of media that

the scrolling is instinctual and consuming.

will degrade you.

Apple got a strangle-hold on the masses of nongeeks

Pornhub isn’t too bad because who can bash

with its sleek streamlined figure and luxury in upcharged price

but i found its spoils too early.

the world’s oldest profession

infecting young, old, dumb, rich alike.

I let it be my nightly ritual and my morning routine for too long.

I think Steve Jobs is a dickhead.

4chan is an obvious cesspool

Facebook sells your persona blatantly

but at least it recognizes its abhorrent nature,

to the advertisements that are targeted and tolerated,

humility is a dying trait in this capitalist world.

and Instagram is designed so perfectly for the flicking thumb to doomscroll to mind-numbing stagnation.

Ah hell, Meta now wants to take your peripherals with a headset and keep you in some fancy virtual pens. i’m assured that Mark Zuckerberg is a lizard.

Twitter gives motherfuckers

platforms

to

the

who spew shit through their golden grin.

It’s gonna be glorious to see it bleed out

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YouTube tries to lure you in with some media that will enhance you

loudest

When the nukes fall from Hell up high, will the remnants of Homo Sapiens be holding their breath waiting for the next update?

Every blow steels my resolve.

–– in a wretched town where the support beams rot and the stones erode, with a pleasure to fail a vagrant enters and begs like he’s been trained to do.

“Gladly do I accept this new trial! Blessed are the worthy!” he prays to a brute outside of a tavern who laughs at the opportunity. the brute cracks a bottle over the vagrant’s head, studding his head with glittering green glass making blood seep into the eyes.

“Blood washes my eyes and cleanses my vision!” he begs for more. the brute kicks two teeth loose and spits on the filth in front of him-“You justify my faith!” and the brute who pounced with a raised fist primed, falters. the vagrant laughs then rises taller, holding the man’s scruffy beard like an empathetic saint, bloodied and strong.

“Through pain, through agony - I drag myself to the Light!” amused at the body’s singular response to pain the vagrant’s will is a strength beyond physical and he stands with his burdens while the fragile brute kneels.

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UNDERGRAD | PAINTING/DRAWING

Alemir Beltre she/her

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Untitled 2023 Ink and Graphite on Paper 22" x 22" 72

UNDERGRAD | VISUAL ARTS

Riss Principe It is easy to get caught up in an endless cycle of trying to find a label that feels like it accurately represents all that you are. In this piece I wanted to capture this frustration of trying to build a fluid sense of identity that doesn't fit within society's binaries and see each of the figures as different representations of myself.

Maybe a Man but Never With a Mustache 2022 Lithograph on Stonehenge Paper 8.5" x 11" 73

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GRAD | PHOTOGRAPHY AND RELATED MEDIA

Cassie Jain she/her

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Photo

Untitled (Massimo) 2022 ograph (Silver Gelatin Negative) 11" x 14"

Bruise From Goth Party 2020 Photograph (Silver Gelatin Negative) 11" x 14"

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GRAD | PHOTOGRAPHY AND RELATED MEDIA

Viktorsha Uliyanova she/her

“Quiet Mournings” is an ongoing weekly installation project in Ulster County forests, trails and public spaces that I began at the outset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Using handmade camera obscuras, I take weekly photographs capturing light moving across the sky. The photographs are intentionally exposed to the natural elements of water, wind and snow. They mark the passage of time and create a space for contemplating feelings of uncertainty, shame, loss and grief in the time of war.

Quiet Mournings 52 2022 C-print 3" x 5"

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Quiet Mournings 52 2022 C-print 3" x 5"

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In conversation with Emma Hines

A Break in the Clo Pastel on

by Eoin Dennis I’m sitting in an ornate, green velvet chair across from the incomparable Emma Hines. She graduated from New Paltz with a BFA in Painting and Drawing back in the Spring of 2021. We’re in her attic studio in Kingston. The floors are a funny robin’s egg blue embellished with the occasional paint splatter and space heater. Acrylics and pastels blanket the studio like snow, and behind her lie three windows framed on each side by dozens and dozens of her paintings and drawings.

Emma has a suave nature about herself. She slides back in her chair and hugs her knee, adorned with a glass of white wine and a pair of cozy purple slippers.

Let’s start off strong: how do you explore the concept of change in your work?

Um, well, I think to start that answer I have to zoom out a little bit, because the work is just one of the iterations of how I understand the world and the person. I think change is the most inevitable and most reliable thing that we have in this world. Everything changes. We change and ironically that’s the only constant, right? Like, knowing that things will change. Change can feel really scary and that’s something that grounds a lot of people. If you’re able to make peace with the fact that nothing you know will stay the same then you’ll free yourself from a lot of discomfort. It’s something that I’ve always thought about. And, I’m sure you’ll ask later on about my inspirations and stuff, but my biggest inspiration, and the thing that my work embodies that most is water. It’s constant in that it’s this thing living through its own cycle. But, it changes forms all the time from being a block of ice to a stream to water vapor and clouds — it changes everything around us. Water can carve stone! It changes our physical bodies - it changes everything.

I love this symbol of water as a concept for change. There are all of these different forms of H20; steam, liquid, condensation, clouds. But its components stay the same. These are the same particles, they’re just exhibited in different ways.

Exactly that to me also brings up a lot of themes in life and in my work of trying to hold these two opposite things in the same space. There’s a lot of nuance in the fact that something can be black and white, and both can be true. And I think it’s hard for us to wrap our brains around its complexity. I enjoy water as a symbol for that reason - because it is all of those things: It can be strong and supple, and it can be constant and also ever-changing. It’s really difficult to sit with, but I think that it’s important to sit with.

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In terms of materiality, how has your work changed since the beginning of college?

Since the beginning of college it’s changed quite a bit! When I first started my art education at New Paltz, I was very focused on trying to get things right and trying to learn the materials.

There’s a certain amount of decision making that I think only comes when you mature a bit as an artist. When you’re just starting out, you’re just kind of learning what you have to play with. There’s also this big focus on oil painting in the painting department at New Paltz which is not a focus in my work anymore. I’ve got a ton of oil paints and oil paintings that I’ve made in the past and it just doesn’t serve the purpose for what I’m trying to investigate right now. I have not used oil paint consistently for a few years now.

What about in terms of concept? Have you always been painting water?

I’m a goody two shoes, I’m a, “play by the book, follow the rules, give me a gold star,” kind of gal. When I was learning art in school, I was always looking for the validation that I was doing it right. The thing about that is, if you try to follow a prompt that a professor gives you, to a certain point that

ouds 2023 n Birch Panel 9” x 12”

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Visitor' 2022 Oil, Acrylic, Pastel on Canvas 48"x 36"

untitled 2023 Pastel on Birch Panel 9" x 12" 83

work sucks. I didn’t realize that just doing what I wanted would be way better than trying to figure out what I thought someone else would want from me. That’s not what making art is about - that’s what pleasing people is about. Making good art is about finding the things that resonate with you and make you feel curious and not even understanding why because that comes later! It might not even come. It’s about paying attention to the things that excite you. And, when I figured that out, it was like a light bulb had gone off. I was like, “Oh yeah! I can just draw a bunch of lines that are cool to me,” and that would be way better than trying to fit it into whatever idea I thought someone else wanted. I think all of the prompts that were designed in a lot of the classes I took were really broad. That was intentional. It encouraged people to interpret it however they wanted to. For me, I struggled with that because I was looking for the ‘right answer’. It wasn’t until I reached a certain point of maturity as an artist that I realized this isn’t about making other people happy - it’s about doing what I think is cool.

Does the viewer inform your projects?

I don’t think of the viewer ever. Is that bad? What I’m doing has nothing to do with anyone else. All I’m doing is taking note of moments of magic in the world and feeling deeply connected to the things that spark joy and excitement. I’m not even thinking about myself in those moments. It’s not about a person, or me as a person, it’s just about that experience. When I put it on paper, or when I put it on canvas, I can only hope that someone will connect to that raw genuine excitement that encouraged me to bring it into the world. It’s not guaranteed that someone will, and if they don’t that’s really fine with me.

What was your experience like within the BFA? Do you feel New Paltz prepared you for life post-undergrad?

I gained a lot of skills through working with professors at SUNY New Paltz. I think it’s important to think critically about every institution you participate in, and I think it’s important to hold criticism. Sit with that criticism, understand where it’s coming from and understand how you can make changes either in your life or in the systems that you encounter on a daily basis.

Whether that be your school, your local government, or even your workplace, it’s important to always think about what you’re doing and if your values are in line with it. With that said, there are definitely parts of my education at New Paltz that could have been more robust. But, I had a great time, I loved going to New Paltz. It was a wonderful place to go to school, and I sure did have my ideas of how I would change things. Having graduated, I see those areas as opportunities for me to act as my own entrepreneur and educate myself in 84

some really practical manners.

Let’s get a little looser, how do you start a painting?

What’s that process like?

My process has changed a lot. I had to learn the best way to make paintings for myself. No one else can teach you how to do that. It takes a lot of your own inquiry about how you learn and how you create. I had a professor once who encouraged me to find images that I was inspired by, print them out and just let them soak into me unconsciously as I paint. I tried that, and I would get overwhelmed because I could see that there are things that I liked - but then it would get abstract, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I was like, “Oh, where’s the magical unconscious osmosis where the good stuff just starts to flow through me?” I didn’t understand how to bridge that gap.

Then, in a moment of frustration, I took a stack of images that I collected, and I spread them out all over the floor and, without thinking, I picked out images that were speaking to me and images that weren’t speaking to me. I had piles of images, and I didn’t know what was exciting about them they were just just speaking to me. I then started creating a map of similarities that I would see. Oh, these ones all have some reflective quality. These ones all have an element of lines receding into space. These ones all have a composition that somehow includes a circle and a triangle. Then, what started to happen was these clusters of similar images were forming.

I would take notes and force myself to articulate the elements of every single pile, and once I had that it served as a kind of checklist for things that are fundamental qualities I want to see in my work. It can be something as specific as a color palette to something as abstract as a ‘blurred abstract background space with source of light at left corner.’ It helps to ground me and focus me for a piece that I’m working on, so I know why and what I’m doing. It’s a life hack!

Where do these images come from?

They come from all over the place. A lot of them are photos that I take on my iPhone when I’m walking around. It could be an image of a sparkly river, or it could be the way that the sidewalk cracks in a really beautiful way. Sometimes it’s cool stuff that I find on Instagram, sometimes it’s a diagram of a molecule in a physics textbook. I would encourage anyone who has interests that they’re unsure of fitting into their own work to just take the time to investigate what is exciting for you and I promise that it will find its way in.

I like that you’re printing them out. I’m thinking of that whole thing that some professors say at the start 85

of classes about stressing the need for taking notes on paper over on a computer. It seems that you’re applying that kind of methodology within your artmaking practice. Would you say that technology has a dominance over your sort of image collecting? Or do you find that you’re able to just as easily find and use a printed image or drawing?

I understand what you mean. It’s like, does the pervasiveness of Instagram and having an iPhone get in the way of seeing beauty and other places in the world? My iPhone is an incredible tool. I use it every day in my art practice. I use it to take photos, I use it to print, I use it to find reference images.

A lot of what I see out in the world that is exciting to me I will capture with my iPhone. I don’t think that what I see on social media or through other avenues takes precedence over being able to see beauty in the world. That is, I think, just an inherent part of being an artist in this day and age.

As an artist, what’s your relationship with technology like?

Technology is an amazing tool. Like I said, my iPhone is an incredible thing that helps me focus and capture things in the world that I’m excited by. Photoshop is amazing, it helped me create a whole color palette for a series of work that I really enjoyed. Technology is so embedded in our culture and our psyche in terms of how we interact with the world. I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge how my attention span has changed because of my relationship with certain apps *cough* Instagram *cough*. I think the way that we interact with the world now is fundamentally different than people living fifty or even thirty years ago. There’s a lot of pros and cons but I try to stay on the optimistic side.

Do you think social media helps or hinders you as an artist?

Social media is a marketing tool created to sell advertising aimed at its users. Social media works by maintaining the attention of the user for as long as possible -- which has detrimental effects on the length of time in which we are engaging with other things in the world. There’s not as much instant gratification when you’re looking at a painting to when you’re looking at a hot babe on IG. What, where, and who influences you?

It really is whatever catches my eye. My biggest duty as an artist is to not turn that off. I have this little clear plastic bowl that I bought from the dollar store. I bought it because it

‘Breakfast Techno at the River House’ Pastel, Oil on Canvas 42"x36"

2021

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‘Fruition” 2021 Acrylic, Gouache Pastel on Canvas 22”x28”

87

looked cool, and it’s shaped like a shell. One day, the light from my studio was shining through it, and it reflected light on the table the same that water would. I bought a few more, lined them all up, and put them next to some mason jars. I really liked how the light was shining through them! It’s just a matter of being open minded to what’s around you and then completely running with it. Whether it’s light, or water, or plastic, or maybe even something more depressing like the way an oil spill coats a sidewalk - that’s interesting! I’m also influenced by other artists. The transcendentalists are a huge group that I’m inspired by: Agnes Felton, Georgia O’Keefe.

I also enjoy glass work as well. I find glass a really exciting medium to look at. I’ll take inspiration from physics - it’s really exciting the ways that our bodies and selves experience time.

Talk to me about your location as an artist. Is being close to New York City helpful?

A benefit of being close to one of the greatest art hubs in the world is that you get access to a lot of things that are weird and make you uncomfortable. I think it’s important to be exposed to things that make you think about what you like and what you don’t like - and develop those thoughts for yourself. That helps you figure out what you want to be doing. Even if you see something that you don’t necessarily think you would do, it’s important to understand the context in which you are operating in the world. We need more weird stuff! I think New York is great because there’s a lot of people pushing boundaries, and there’s a lot of people being really true to themselves. And, yeah, truth can be weird! New York is convenient in its abundance of opportunity to see great work, and I try to get to there as much as I can - but there are also a lot of wonderful art things happening in the Hudson Valley.

There are lots of small pockets of amazing art at galleries all throughout Kingston, New Paltz, Beacon, Hudson, and Rhinecliff. I try to go to shows as much as I can, and it’s rewarding every time.

Do you have any advice for any undergraduate students in and out of school?

I would say for people that have yet to graduate: try not to take yourself too seriously. This is a beautiful practice, and it’s such a privilege to know so early in life about the joy and meaning of being a creative person. That being said, there’s no need to put all this pressure on yourself. Be humble and work hard.

Those are the biggest things - because the work will speak for itself. Also, just as a note - your first year out of college is going to be a shitshow. Don’t be hard on yourself, just keep making work whenever you can. It’s easy to make a bunch of things that don’t feel like your best work, as long as you keep working you can get to a place where you feel like you’re making good work. It’s a lot easier to build momentum than if you stop and wait for the right time. In the reality of things, you never know when a small drawing made when you were bored can turn into an incredible masterpiece, and no one says a masterpiece has to be made out of expensive things.

How has your work or practice shifted since graduating?

This is a really important question. I had to take serious consideration of the space that I had access to and the facilities that I had access to. I did not want to deal with the struggle of properly cleaning oil based paints in a sink that I shared in an apartment with five other people! That encouraged me to shift to less toxic, water soluble mediums, which also allowed me to work in my bedroom. It was often the only private space I had access to, which I think is really relatable for a lot of artists.

Not everyone has the luxury of a studio. I had a tiny bedroom where I could only make a corner into my studio, and I did what I had to do. This meant making small scale drawings for a portion of my life and those drawings are awesome. It’s like a goldfish: If you put a goldfish in a little tank it’ll be happy, but it can only grow as big as its container. That doesn’t make it less beautiful - it just is what it is.

Does your location matter when trying to network within the art world?

Probably. I don’t think I’ve been around in the game long enough to say much more. When I was living home with my parents after graduating, it was a lot harder to feel like I was a part of this community of artists when I didn’t know of any artists around me doing that or really caring enough. I do find in the Hudson Valley, where I am now, that living with artists, being friends with artists, and showing up at openings means a lot to me. It means a lot to me to keep going and to feel valued as opposed to living in an environment where I felt like I was doing some ‘silly hobby’ and being so isolated from the world.

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GRAD | SCULPTURE

Michael Fortenberry he/him

Water of Resistence 2022 Glass, Debris, Water 48" x 36" x 48"

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"Community Disturbance Project - “this is a sculpture” was built with the idea to highlight the underground skate community and play with the idea that skateboarding is destructive and a nuisance. I saw happiness and gathering. This is the first halfpipe to my knowledge that is portable and can fit through any regular door, allowing it to pop up anywhere at any time to create community.

Its first location was the SUNY New Paltz farmers' market and it received an abundance of support from all of the stands and received applause when the box got escorted out of the market. This unfolded in the market unknowingly to anyone.

The pedestal and white cube relate to the traditional notion of high art and what is deemed as successful art. This project is intended to be a mobile white cube that is unfolded into a skate ramp and plays with the idea of what is art.

The exterior of the cube becomes the interior of the ramp. When the cube is reassembled, the marks of the community “destruction” decorate the cube. In the act of engaging with the sculpture the white cube is destroyed and any idea of what art should be."

Community Disturbance Project - "this is a sculpture" 2021 Video- Wood, Steel, Skateboards 48" x 36" x 72", 240 x 90

Mental Topography 2022 Wood, Acrylic 48" x 36" x 3"

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Tub Time 2022 Wood, Incense, Steel 48" x 96" x 10"

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Tub Time provides a space for slowing down and disengaging anxiety. It offers a gentle invitation for a viewer to lay down into a pool of incense smoke that is meant to provide a cleansing, uplifting moment and is traditionally understood as a catalyst for accessing the divine across cultural traditions. The physical sculpture registers subtle associations with burial chambers and sacred architectural spaces.

The scent of the smoke will seep into the fabric of the viewer's clothes, now imprinted with the memory of the participant's experience.

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GRAD | SCULPTURE

Jana Astanov she/her

Selva, Slavic Goddess of The United Field 2022 Sculpture 11" x 7" x 8"

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UNDERGRAD | ASIAN STUDIES

Alex MacDonald he/him

This pin imagines personality as a vortex of factors.

Amid the dynamic mix of experiences, memories, and impressions is a golden kernel. Layers of brass and copper are separated with spacers and riveted together. The bottom layers of brass are mirror polished and the top two copper layers of copper have been treated with liver of sulphur. Over time the copper will oxidize and change color.

Self Portrait 2022 Copper, Brass, Steel Wire 2.5" x 2.5" x 1" 96

UNDERGRAD | DRAWING/PAINTING

Minh Doan

Water Buffalo 2022 Ceramics 5.9" x 7.8" x 11.8" 97

Spring 2022 Oil on Canvas 32" x 42" 98

In Conversation with Anat Shiftan

by Olivia Rose

Anat Shiftan has been an incredible mentor, teacher, and leader in the SUNY New Paltz Ceramics Program for twentyone years. Her time teaching celebratorily comes to a close this Spring 2023 as she retires. Shiftan has been teaching Ceramics since 1986 after graduating with her Bachelors in English Literature and Philosophy from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and Design in Michigan in 1986. She has had solo exhibitions at museums such as Zillman Art Museum, Vessels Gallery, and Clay Art Center, just to name a few recent exhibits. Anat Shiftan has witnessed alterations within the SUNY system, the transformation of the Ceramics Department, and has had to balance life as an educator, individual artist, and mother.

Shiftan did not originally take the artistry path. After graduating with a degree in English Literature and Philosophy, she switched to the artist route. I asked Shiftan how she feels the way she teaches now is different from the way she was taught art in school, to which she said, “That’s assuming it’s different.”

“I only went to two years in undergraduate art school. I’m very influenced by my teachers. I had a lot of teachers with really strong personalities. They stayed my friends and mentors beyond school. One teacher, her name is Dina, she’s still my friend today. She gave us formal problems to solve. I really enjoyed that. She critiqued them from a formal point of view.

I really enjoyed that as well. It was a lot about being logical which made a lot of sense for me. I give exercises like that too. In my basic class, I have students make two boxes that are the same. Then I say, “decorate them so I think one is big or small, or one is soft or hard.” That was influenced by her way of thinking about form and the relationship between form and surface. I’m really interested in this connection between form and surface, and how, in ceramics, it’s so special, that form and surface are connected.”

Still Life in White 2010–2020 Polished Porcelain 60" x 7" x 16"

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Orchard in Yellow with Two Large Pear Porcelain, Matt Yellow G 24" x 17

Fields 2019 Glazed porcelain 26" x 13" x 13"

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2020 Glazes 7" x 16"

What changes have you seen within SUNY New Paltz since you began teaching here?

“Well, one thing that I think really changed is the funding for the school. There’s a lot of rigidity that comes with funding.

For example, because funding is different, and the tuition is more expensive, we are really encouraged to have students finish strictly in four years. Even when people could have a little more mentorship, the tuition does not allow them to have that, because it’s unacceptable to the families. Tuition got really high, and then with the Excelsior program, there’s that pressure. For some people it is a lot. When I think about [the ceramics] program, I just think it’s always better and better, just from being here long, a lot of experience, and gaining that kind of connection to all the years. When I came here, it was my first year and my second year and my third year, but then when it became my 12th year and my 13th year then I began to feel that I’m building on what was before. What students did before informs what’s happening, even though students might not know it. It’s kind of like in the air, and also in the books. So in that way, there’s a sense of building a legacy for the place.

But I don’t know how it changed other than the economic pressures. I think it was always a really good program and our program, we didn’t change the curriculum so much. We believe in our curriculum strongly.”

What in the world inspires you and informs your creative practice? Are there any alterations to your

life that have had a big influence?

“One part of my work is about a relationship with nature.

I’ve always thought about how we see nature, and how we interpret nature. And, if nature is accessible to us, so we have the concept of nature, but nature, the way it appears to us, is not natural anymore. We have the ideal of nature, as in the Garden of Eden, maybe the original state. Then we have a longing for that ideal moment. But, really, nature, the way it presents to us, is very similar to the way the human world presents itself to us. So nature and humanity are in constant war and conflict and competition and good stuff and bad stuff, that kind of thing. So I think that that is one thing that really influenced my thought. One event that had a significant impact on my work was that I had children. That was hard.

When I had children, I wanted to play on the sidewalk and go see frogs in the woods. So, I wasn’t that much in the studio for about seven years. I think the reason I look at nature, also, is that it’s very similar to humanity, but a little easier to digest than the world.”

How did you find a consistent style within your body of work?

“Well, if you look at my work, I do a lot of different things.

I have a moment that I’m slip casting, I have a moment that I’m slab building, I have a moment that I’m extruding. I think what I like to do is know a lot of different techniques and apply them to my work. And about style—what I’d like to tell you 102

is that, if you think that I have a style, maybe it’s time to do something different. There are things that are very basic; I love color and pattern. I love flowers. I love dots. I love porcelain.

I love celadon. But a specific kind of aesthetics is almost in your genes. You’re almost born that way. If I think about my first project in year one in art school, it’s totally informing my work now, and my aesthetics now. I’m very interested in what’s abstract, but not abstraction for the sake of being contentless, but, rather, being closer as to what is the human spirit, the human experience, or the human spirit in the world. Like, the poetics of being.”

What have you seen change in the ceramics world during your career?

“I would say that it’s become a few things. One, it used to be pottery and industry and some sculpture. Pottery and sculpture were pretty earthy. Industry was pretty fancy: porcelain, white, and clean. Eventually, there was this fascination with the aesthetics of Mingay. It influenced the industry to bring more of the handmade into industry to imitate the handmade industry. So that’s one thing that I noticed. The other thing that I noticed is that it has become much more pluralistic and diverse. There are so many voices in ceramics that you can’t even say what is ceramics now. It can be pottery, it can be sculpture, it can be dirty, it can be clean, it can be industrial, looking at the new, the handmade, it can be pop-ish, so it’s like juicy and relating to popular culture, it can do anything. Which is something nice that clay can be anything. It’s a material that can really lose its personality and try to be anything which is very different from any other materials. For wood—if you want it to look like something else, you have to paint it or you know, hide its grain. With clay, it doesn’t have enough. It’s sticky, and it sticks to itself, and it reacts to gravity. And it reacts to the materials we make it from but in a way, you know, it’s formless, it can be anything. So that’s really the magic of it.”

It was an absolute pleasure speaking with Shiftan about her work, career, and love of art and flowers. Anat Shiftan has personally served as an incredibly inspiring mentor for me, and her presence in the art department will be missed. It is incredibly beautiful to see the culmination of 21 years of teaching at SUNY New Paltz. I hope that after reading this interview everyone feels a strong desire to stop to smell the flowers, and play with the frogs. Thank you Anat.

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Garden Views: Summer, Winter 2012 Manganese Brushwork, Silver, and Orange Luster Glazed Porcelain 12" x 9"

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ALUMNI | VISUAL ARTS 2022

Kezia Hatch she/they

"Fuck Off Moth" is a part of a series of works where I tackled the topic of trauma. This piece focuses on the topic of sexual assault. The Moth is a ward using its large size and eye-like pattern to scare away any predators and keep its wearer safe from harm.

Fuck off Moth 2022 Reused Fabrics, Fabric Paint, Tent Poles 55" x 43"

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UNDERGRAD | PHOTOGRAPHY

Jangir Qayum he/him

Precious Possession Digital File 1920 x 1280

106

ALUMNI | PHOTOGRAPHY 2015

Kaitlyn Flannagan she/her

This series was created with the intention of breaking the cycle of creating and editing photographs digitally by using tactile experimentation and manipulation of self portraiture. Using materials like ink and bleach, I was able to explore the idea of manipulating my image through additive and reductive processes. This experience pushed me as an artist outside of a comfort zone I had found myself in, and through the process I was able to conceptually explore and question how I perceive myself and how I wish to be perceived by others.

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Untitled 2021 Mixed Media 4" x 6" 108

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UNDERGRAD | CERAMICS

Taylor Lannon she/her

111

Historical Self Portrait 2020 Collage, Paint Pen 4" x 6"

ALUMNI | CERAMICS 2018

Lena Chin

Entropic 2023 Porcelain, Gold Leaf 11" x 6" x 9"

112

UNDERGRAD | VISUAL ARTS

Gwen Grimes she/her

Aside from an introductory cut-out charm, this 'selfportrait' project was my first experience tinkering with metal and working beyond sawing, filing, and sanding. The concept of a 'self-portrait' for this badge was guided more by textures and forms I identify/ enjoy working with, rather than underlain meaning.

I am drawn toward darker earthy tones, as well as gnarled and sharp subject matter through a variety of media; most often drawing. In the baby metalstudio for Intro and Basic classes, working outside of classtime was a wild and uninhibited stir of fire, chemical irritants, and total improvisation. Magic!

Science! A mix of both! The outcome barely shows any resemblance to my plans A, B, or C! And despite breaking the recommended order of processes to an absurd degree, (sorry Lynn), the end result came together better than I hoped for! All-in-all, this project was rigorous and immensely rewarding! I learned so much! Hurray!

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Riveting / TPKMFA 2023 Brass, Copper 3" x 1" 114

GRAD | DRAWING/PAINTING

Anna Tjernlund she/her

Peanuts 2021 Charcoal 18" x 24"

The stories we grow up part in how we come so much about our role expectations. My goal the reframing of familia it more accessible to wo Highlighting the inner women and girls, and m healthy relationships ar main focuses of my wor 115

Puppy Love 2022 Charcoal 18" x 24"

with play a big to understand es and societal as an artist is ar lore, to make omen and girls. r strengths of modeling safe, re some of the rk.

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Bait 2022 Charcoal 22" x 30"

I highlight the vulnerability as well as the strength of each character, to prove that the duality within them not only exists, but is in fact what makes them more complete in their condition, and more capable of navigating a dark and complicated world.

Protector 2021 Charcoal 9" x 11"

In this small series, my characters have found strength in their companionship.

A girl and her dog: a less familiar version of an age-old trope.

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December 2022 Oil 18" x 24"

This series is inspired by Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog": a science fiction novella which lauds the relationship between man and his best friend. Here, "December" pays homage to the dark, SciFi spirit of that narrative.

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UNDERGRAD | CERAMICS

Alex Lopez-Reyes he/him

121

UNDERGRAD | SCULPTURE

Rachel Gee

she/her

Mapping Decay 2022 Steel

122

UNDERGRAD | VISUAL ARTS

Ciara Molumby she/her

Boyish 2022 Watercolor and Micron Pen on Yupo Paper 11" x 14"

123

UNDERGRAD | PAINTING

Daryn Seiden

is it time? 2022 Acrylic on Canvas 48" x 36" 124

UNDERGRAD | CERAMICS/ CREATIVE WRITING

Olivia Rose she/her

In my work I explore the transformation of the two dimensional into the three dimensional. I create sculptural vessels that reference flatness as a way to explore ideas of multidimensionality.

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Oh, Beloved 2020 Glazed Ceramic 16" x 6" x 6"

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Inside Out 2022 Glazed Ceramic 14" x 6" x 6"

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Inside Out 2022 Glazed Ceramic 20" x 16" x 3" 128

UNDERGRAD | PAINTING/DRAWING

Olivia Schmidt she/her

This piece was created in inspiration of the verb “thicken”. From being sexually harassed throughout my life and always referred to as “thick” and known for my “fat ass”, it has torn me down. I portrayed my lifelong emotions of this by ripping into the skin of my body to remove the “thickness” that has objectified me forever.

To Thicken 2023 Acrylic on Canvas 8" x 16" 129

UNDERGRAD | VISUAL ARTS

The Portal is Open 2022 Charcoal on Paper 29" x 20"

Ellie Cromling she/her

130

UNDERGRAD | DRAWING/PAINTING

Eoin Dennis he/him

Stumps 2022 Oils

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Vault Triptych was born out of an appreciation for flash tattoos and video games.

Vault Triptych 2021 Oils 132

UNDERGRAD | DRAWING/PAINTING

Harrison Atwater he/him

Triple Dog Dare 2023

The air was was smooth and ripe and smelled of hot glue.

We took refuge in the dusty AC and still I found something to complain about.

Slithering through the Mohawk Valley, mouths chewing on pride and fast food and everything was so horrifyingly fine that I swore each overpass was bound to collapse beneath us.

In order to restore the balance.

But here you are, pretentious enough to prove that sometimes we deserve to feel good, That we deserve goodness Because we are good.

And I throw a stern glance at the antlered contortionist who stuck his bloody landing at the road’s shoulder and try not to wonder what must have given So that I may feel good.

From this side of the glass I can cross my legs because I choose to (thank you).

I wash my plate and yours and I try not to decide if I am good because of it.

Save the decision-making for bedtime, Where I can dream about being good because it costs less.

Dowse 2022 Silkscreen on Fabric 36" x 36" 133

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Annual Honesty 2022 Abaca Paper, Wire, Collage, Gouache

Heirloom The bloodlust is inherited, packed away in a jewelry box.

An heirloom, singed and exiled under beds and in empty hands.

When dad’s at work we go shopping for long sleeves in summer and bag our bellies half-full at separate tables.

Heads down, because it’s hard to eat with rifles for arms, even harder to watch each other fumble with the cuffs and pull over the barrel.

At night we take turns sneaking pages from a Weight Watcher’s bible. treading lightly, and blindly, skipping steps back up the stairs to tuck them under the pillow Where did we get so unhuman?

Not animalistic but somewhere in between and stuck in a reflection.

Apparitions.

Musket-limbed with a scoped vision.

Bellies up, and hands pointed like guns at the mirror

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UNDERGRAD | SCULPTURE

Joli Perfit she/her

Formal Bagel Routine 2021 video 137

UNDERGRAD | VISUAL ARTS

Jamieson Caywood he/they

What Can I Get Ya?

2022 13" x 9"

138

ALUMNI | 2022

Emilie Houssart she/her

House Suit is a performance work that entangles commercial home construction, the forest and the white female body in the Hudson Valley landscape. A wandering hybrid, an evolutionary offshoot of our times, is constricted to basic geometric motions. The performance questions local picturesque narratives of the landscape, drawing in themes of witnessing and surveillance.

House Suit 2020 White Euro cis-female body; reclaimed house parts (Wood-Look Vinyl Flooring, Air Conditioning Register Box, Plastic Outlet Cover, Linoleum Floor Tile, Electrical Wiring, Chrome-look Towel Ring, MDF Trim, Wood-look Shelf, Coated MDF Cabinet Door, Wooden Stair Baluster, Aluminum Downspout A-elbow, Fluted Steel Pipe, Plywood, Bolts, Hinges).

Witness photograph (above) and screenshot from witness cellphone video of infrared binoculars (top right), both from live performance. Still image from motion-activated infrared wildlife camera video (bottom right).

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ALUMNI | 2016

Shani Richards she/her

Barb wire is a type of steel fencing with sharp edges or points arranged at intervals. Its commonly used by farmers and cowboys to keep livestock (cattle) in. It is also used to keep people out of private property and in prisons.

I handmade my version of barb wire with nickel and steel into an Afro shape. Afros symbolize black power. The black body was once seen as property to be bought and sold in America. Black women were treated like breeding horses to produce more property to exploit for economic gain. The trauma of the past can still be felt today and I made this crown as a way to convey and ownership of my body. To be a stand in for the strong black women that came before me, who took on obstacles and found a way to fly over them like warriors.

Afro American 2022 Handmade barb wire, nickel, steel 10" x 13" 141

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UNDERGRAD | SCULPTURE

Mariah Day she/her

For this art piece I wanted to capture the form my own body takes when in distress, but in a way that others could relate.

A Feeling Made In Form 2022 Unfired Red Clay, Press Mold/ Slip Cast

143

ALUMNI | PHOTOGRAPHY 2022

Eric Afflerbach Natural Indecency 2022 Digital Photography 14" x 21"

he/him

144

UNDERGRAD | ART EDUCATION

Grace Mahanna she/her

A large theme of my work is focusing on the perspective of women, the male gaze and sexual assault. This painting discusses the want for control of a situation but the hands continue to slip.

grasp 2022 Oil Paint 32" x 42" 145

146

UNDERGRAD | METAL

Reed Humphrey they/them

The hands in the front and back centerpieces are arranged to appear like they are either coming from one body or two, and breaking away from an embrace, symbolizing the losing of oneself in another person, and the damaging, cyclical nature of valuing someone else more than yourself.

Apart, Together 2022 Silicon Bronze, Tulle 17" x 9" 147

148

Toward an Augmented Condition

by Marielena Ferrer

I have said that my art practice follows, at least in part, my larger desire to help people become aware of their identities and their environmental realities as fully as possible. In this paper, I seek an opportunity to explore new realities that the internet provides and ways in which art breaks through those realities.

To me, identity is how we perceive, regard, and express ourselves. It is an enduring yet changing sense of who we are. I sometimes use plural identities to emphasize that our identity fluidly evolves and sometimes shifts as we live, including to how we aspire to be. At the same time, “reality” can be defined as the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, our social and cultural milieus, as opposed to that which is only imaginary. But aren’t the worlds we imagine real too? As Timothy Leary stated, “truth is in the eye of the beholder,” and quite often we define our reality in relation to how we identify ourselves, and vice versa.

In the three decades since the internet’s commercialization as a global communications system, many artistic practices have been examining the different visual and cultural shifts caused by technological updates. From net.art to post-internet art to augmented reality art, these practices have problematized the different conditions that have marked each period. The web stages, from the early internet to the development of the Internet of Things, structure an important genealogy that reveals its process of integration in the global culture. Human environs have been tremendously affected too, from the internet’s Defense Department beginnings in cyberspace to its incorporation in data-enabled physical spaces, where the lives of users and their daily activities take place.

According to the current development, there is a particular space between the participatory Web 2.0 and the semantic Web 3.0: a period in which a new technological disruption and a new evolution emerges. Exponential technologies outline the formats and ideologies of the internet in the current decade, a life situation mediated by sophisticated vision and interaction technologies, with spaces characterized by high connectivity and the presence of artificial intelligences for the optimization of our daily lives.

Two conditions are converging here; the condition online/offline and the augmented condition, which I’m interested in: a world stressed by high technologies and devices capable of processing the images captured in real time in a specific geolocated space. In this way, the experience of physical spaces is presented from a new materiality, real/virtual, executable places designed for the installation of synthetic images that extend the perception of our most immediate reality: an augmented reality.

These images, thus augmented, are an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of imagery, since its (re)presentation—intelligent, contextual, and relational—fractures the conventions of the image subject to its supports and spaces for installation. The augmented image is a visual and interactive experience that occurs in the here and now, extending the perception of the users– spectators who wander our (hyper)connected urban spaces.

Between the Web 2.0 and 3.0 periods, artistic practices begin to prefigure a new turn in accordance with a major update of their technologies. During the expansion and institutionalization of post-internet art, the first artistic practices of augmented reality emerged at the user level. In this in-between web period, a new condition of the world is envisioned, boosted by exponential 149

technologies during the 2010s, to verify the emergence of a new internet logic.

Post-internet art is an artistic phenomenon that reflects, through its discourses and aesthetics, the predisposition of a world that incorporates the internet and its mediations into any activity of life.

The age of access, characteristic of the Web 1.0 period—which reduced the activity of connectivity to desktops, in work and domestic spaces, during specific connection times—gives way to an era of portability; a situation in which the concept connectivity is naturalized with the arrival of the first web-connected mobile devices, which brought faster and more accessible connections, as well as the expansion of wireless networks in urban spaces. The experience of connectivity is a “real” perception that keeps users in an online continuum. The internet ceases to be used only in special situations and becomes instead central to daily life.

From the art linked to the internet in the first decade of this century, emerging artists started reflecting on an art “after the internet.” The artist, writer, and critic Marisa Olson coined the term post-internet in 2006 to describe her own practice, a concept that was soon expanded by online art forums to unify the heterogeneity of artistic practices that illuminate the internet’s new logic. The same agents of this specific field of art, such as curators, theorists, and artists, are responsible for articulating the post-internet definition, a controversial form of art considered by some to be a simple aesthetic that objectifies the internet and accommodates galleries’ requirements and the broader art market. However, for others, it is an interesting research context that reflects the symptoms of a new social praxis 2.0: the new productions of subjectivity, the politics of performance, and other narcissistic practices.

Throughout our culture we find a broad genealogy of the gaze subject to its particular ways of seeing and to the power relations and technologies that enable them: the gaze of God, the gaze of man, the gaze of the king, the gaze of reason, the gaze of the self, the internet gaze or—why not?—the augmented gaze.

In the eighties, the cyberpunk cultural movement, in its literary and cinematographic aspects, generated an imaginary dystopian future that became deeply embedded in our culture. Stories about cyber-totalitarian societies with a decadent and pessimistic appearance—in which machines claim their independence and humanlike free will, or the desire to experience other realities of an electronic nature as an alternative—are narratives that today already appear possible. Science fiction, also called “anticipation literature,” beyond the literary prejudices that it arouses, is a speculative genre that in many cases serves as a thought device in the field of humanities. Indeed, numerous accelerationist aesthetic proposals integrate in many cases this type of fictional story as a starting point for their reflections. These young thinkers recover the stories of the great figures of cyberpunk, such as Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, or J.G. Ballard, and cross-cut them with Marxist theories and the future of a post-capitalist world.

From a critical post-feminist position, the zoologist and philosopher Donna Haraway published “A Cyborg Manifesto” in 1983, a relevant text in which she articulated one of the key hybrid discourses between philosophy and science fiction. What is revealing about the text is the posthuman position that the author adopts based on the imagining of a future world that has definitively overcome the vertical stories of the past and the gender issues embodied in the figure of the cyborg.

In this way, Haraway proposes overcoming the symbolic order of the sexes, historically subjected to heteropatriarchal precepts, for a new science that promotes the body-machine fusion and the opening to new ways of post-gender thought: 150

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. . . . The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

The online/offline condition refers to a post-internet world, where connectivity goes beyond any activity in life. If, in the Web 1.0 period, the user experience was limited to a specific online space-time, whose actions barely extended beyond a desktop screen, the Web 2.0 period, supported by portable technologies and uninterrupted connections, will end up displacing the body-users from their domestic connection contexts to extend connectivity anytime and anywhere, creating an internet-aware culture.

With the “augmented condition,” we see the internet’s evolution according to new technological updates that announce the development of a new stage and, with this, a turn that brings along new visual and performative regimes with the internet’s high (re)presentational capacity. Exponential technologies, in this case, augmented reality technologies that combine real-world and computergenerated content, increase their mediating possibilities with users for the translation in real time of layers of visible information resulting from the decoding of urban physical spaces created of binary digits.

In a global culture that has agreed on the real/virtual concept to point out experiences intervened by digital technologies and their levels of immersion, the augmented condition refers to a new situation closely linked with simulation technologies that extend a scenario of datafied life occupied by users, portable devices, and smart images. The augmented image, simulated in the same field of vision and interaction that users perceive in its most immediate reality, demonstrates the new condition: the consideration of new materialities in coherence with physical realities that constitute mixed perception spaces.

Nowadays, we cannot think of a world without the mediation of the internet and its everupdating technologies. The next step in internet colonization points to an “embodiment” of the medium: that is, to a high-tech processing in which synthetic and intelligent images are logically coupled, working as a layer within the processes of perception and cognition, with users decoding the seemingly tangible reality that surrounds them. This augmented space extends, artificially overinformed, an augmented reality.

Mechanical and industrial engineering researchers Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino proposed in 1994 a “virtuality continuum” to explain the full spectrum of technological possibilities between a fully virtual experience and an entirely physical-world experience. The area where both the real and the virtual combine is called a mixed reality, a field of action whose degrees of immersion point to an augmented reality or an augmented virtuality. Currently, the “continuum of virtuality” is a feasible reality, with the advent of exponential technologies. The physical spaces in which life develops are computational contexts, highly datafied and sensorized places sensitive to their visual and interactive decoding through augmented reality applications and portable vision machines at the user level.

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Reality–virtuality continuum. Adapted from Milgram, P. & Kishino, F. (1994). A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays

Jeffrey Shaw, The Golden Calf (1994) 152

We also have augmented reality art, or AR art, whose experimental results point to a new web period. The same year that Milgram and Kishino proposed their transcendent “continuum,” the new media artist and researcher Jeffrey Shaw presented the first augmented reality artwork, titled The Golden Calf (1994), an ambitious project that would not be available to the masses until fifteen years later, due to a major update of portable technologies.

At the start of 2010, the first augmented reality art practices for mobile devices broke out.

This art burst critically and creatively to reflect the contemporary political, social, cultural, and environmental tensions in the digitally coded, urbanized spaces of the day. AR art exemplifies the concept “art, internet and life,” or the way in which exponential technologies work in synergy with artists for the construction of new visual and material-virtual interactions. In this way, AR artworks circulate outside the artworld’s institutionalized spaces to establish a direct dialogue between users– artists and users–spectators. Post-internet art did not hesitate to align itself with the requirements of a system that continued to request aesthetic (physical) objects and recognizable formats. However, AR art in its portable version raises visual and interactive proposals that have little to do with conventional art formats, and even less with their exhibition spaces. AR art is an art that does not need large investments or infrastructures to be installed. It mainly needs artists and programmers for the design and configuration of markers in a specific geolocated space. Any AR artist can disseminate code-artifacts that contain a visual and interactive experience in a sensorized space to point out a problem that is close and recognizable by user communities in the context they inhabit.

An AR artist producing the augmented images does not intend for the images to present themselves from a refined aesthetic that seeks to deceive the eye. Rather, the artist seeks to present them from the aesthetics of collage and remix as a device to reconfigure an experience between the tangible and the virtual image, a new way of assembling and reassembling "cut & paste" culture more closely than to the high-tech image. AR art, in this case, does not seek to generate an illusionist proposal but rather an experiential one. The augmented image can happen in any connected public/private space, waiting to be unleashed by users who engage with a “reality” that can no longer be understood without its mixture.

AR art demonstrates the possibilities of the “in-between spaces,” physical/virtual, a new context of interaction and intervention available, and (for now) deregulated, of intelligent images installed on their markers, waiting to be triggered, here/now, to redefine reality.

As a multidisciplinary artist, I am intrigued by the augmented image, a concept closely linked to exponential emerging technologies and digital vision and interaction devices that, thanks to their highly portable, connective and processing capacities, allow coupling, in real time, the simulation of a synthetic image within the user-spectator’s field of vision according to the physical logics that surround him or her. The augmented image reflected through AR artistic practices therefore reveal the symptoms of the evolution of the image toward a new web period. However, we must consider that, from art, even before these sophisticated technologies were available, the augmented image was insinuated aesthetically and intellectually in the context of art throughout the last century in the search for other experimental image models.

"Glissière contenant un moulin à eau (en métaux voisins)" (1913-15), "Neuf Moules Mâlic" (1914-1915), and "À regarder (l’autre côté du verre) d’un œil, de près, pendant presque une heure" (1918) are three visual exercises where Marcel Duchamp explored the formal possibilities of the glass support in the search for an anti-retinal painting: the first tests that would later lead him to the conclusions of "La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même", most often called "The Large Glass (Le Grand Verre)" (1915-1923). For Duchamp, precision painting is an absolutely analytical, 153

aseptic and mathematical anti-mimetic technology, just thought: ideas that find meaning installed in transparency. With this, viewers are not faced with an opaque image—that is, a painting whose background and shape do not allow one to look beyond it, a wall—but rather a painting made up of floating objects that house complex discourses yet seek to relate to the physical environment that surrounds them, to grant visual continuity to the representation that is now presented from different points of view.

In 1923, Duchamp finally exhibited "The Large Glass", a work in progress that led the artist to delay it for more than a decade before finally declaring it “unfinished” the very moment in

Marcel Duchamp, The Large Glass (1915-1923) 154

which he decided to withdraw from the artistic scene to dedicate himself exclusively to chess.

On this large transparent painting, Duchamp arranges elements based on a complex mechanical relationship between image and word. In this case, I am interested in highlighting the innovative support that invites us to a new way of perceiving painting and that refers us, in its analogue form, to an augmented image: a metal frame with a crossbar that holds two large glass sheets that contain the images. With this, Duchamp gives a twist to (pictorial) representation by opening the picturespace to be perceived from all its sides, a transparent screen with no given perspectives of twodimensional images that float in the exhibition space. The Large Glass narrates its particular story while other images and bodies alien to that representation are incorporated into the continent of crystalline background, a vision that mixes art and everyday life. From my point of view, this piece is presented as a starting point to reflect on a genealogy of the image augmented by art, regardless of its technologies, aesthetics that will continue to be repeated until our time.

When I started this research, I was very excited by the idea of a new iteration of my project "Broken Monarchs". The new iteration would be one in which the viewers would not only be surrounded by thousands of butterflies but would also be able to use their portable devices to see the monarchs fly free. I can imagine myself embarking on this ambitious iteration at some future time, for it is currently unfeasible. Nevertheless, and demonstrated by my review of Duchamp’s work, thinking about an augmented image does not exclude artistic practices that do not require augmented reality technologies. I therefore contemplate exploring even more possibilities, physical and virtual, to (re)create art in those in-between spaces, toward an augmented condition. After all, we find ourselves in a moment of convergence between human and nonhuman “bodies” and “intelligences” for the configuration of a mixed scenario: hyperconnective, hypersemantic, hyperrelational, and hypercontextual: a programmed moment that will continue expanding through the years to come. ###

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Bibliography: Bluemink, Matt. “On Virtuality: Deleuze, Bergson, Simondon.” Epoché Magazine, 27 Feb. 2021, https://epochemagazine.org/36/on-virtuality-deleuze-bergson-simondon/ Cipresso, Pietro, et al. “The Past, Present, and Future of Virtual and Augmented Reality Research: A Network and Cluster Analysis of the Literature.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 1 Jan. 1AD, https://doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02086 Duchamp, Marcel. Escritos. Duchamp du signe, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 1978.

Haraway, Donna J.. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=4392065.

Kipper, Gregory. Augmented Reality: An Emerging Technologies Guide to AR. SYNGRESS Publishing, 2013.

Lomborg, Stine. “Datafied Living.” Datafied Living, https://datafiedliving.ku.dk/ Ruckenstein, Minna, and Mika Pantzar. “Datafied Life.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. 19, no. 2, 2015, pp. 191–210., https://doi.org/10.5840/techne20159935

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GRAD | SCULPTURE

Marielena Ferrer she/her

"American Dream" is a stone lithography based on a drawing I made in 2020. The artwork was my response to the reckless handling of the pandemic by the Trump-Pence administration that peaked in an episode that is still considered a defining point in the Covid fight and a prime exhibit of what can go wrong when an over-confident but highly incompetent president believes he can message his way through a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic. Such an event arguably changed the course of political history.

American Dream 2022 Stone Lithography 16” x 13”

157

UNDERGRAD | DRAWING/PAINTING

Bridget Vasquez she/they

“Excalibur” portrays victims of the fur trade industry, possession over non-consenting beings and how it can all be hidden behind bright facades.

Excalibur 2023 Acrylic on Canvas 30" x 48"

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ALUMNI | SCULPTURE 2022

Erin Dougherty she/her

My work addresses the need for resilience, patience, and creativity to cultivate a stable future after experiencing a childhood influenced by alcoholism. Exposure to addiction generates substantial obstacles in one’s ability to create healthy cognitive frameworks.

My experiences permanently altered aspects of my personality and left me without the crucial mental skills I needed to survive. The inflatable structure represents my process of relearning and rebuilding and transforms into an airy (un)monument for learning how to build a new life from what was given. Its brightness, weightlessness and flexibility enables it to rise over the concrete foundation of instability and become steady in its own way.

The Shape of Resilience 2022 Ripstop Nylon, Plastic, Forced Air, PVC Pipes 7" x 7"x 1" 159

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UNDERGRAD | UNDECIDED

Kimi Anicic

she/her

The Talking Stage 2023 Steel, Plaster 8" x 5" x 9" 161

UNDERGRAD | CERAMICS

Ike Lobel he/him

Collapse 3D Printed Ceramics, Soda Fired 11"

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UNDERGRAD | VISUAL ARTS

Natasha Wilk she/they

tell me where it hurts 2022 Oil on Canvas 36" x 42" 163

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UNDERGRAD | PRINTMAKING

Brielle Sarkisian she/they

I’ve been interested in media that portray complex emotions through a lens of childlike wonder. This has inspired me to make work using my own various rabbit characters, inspired by and including my longtime stuffed bunny. My work involves a psychoanalytic process in which I reflect on my own internal feelings and project them onto these alter egos. In this process I aim to conjure themes of navigating anxiety and other dense topics that resonate with the personal experiences of my audience.

The Fall 2022 Aluminium Plate Lithography 11" x 15" 165

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Look at Me! I'm Scared 2022 Stone Lithograph, Watercolor 10" x 13" 168

Up In S Silkscr 11" x 15 169

Space 2022 reen 5"

One Day It Will All Make Sense 2023 Handmade Pigmented Abaca Paper Collage with Embedded Wool Roving 13" x 20"

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UNDERGRAD | SCULPTURE

Kara C.L. Butler she/her

The deer is a timeless symbol of the ineffable and transformative. The wax casts bring together reality (in the inclusion of deer bone, forest debris, and the artist's DNA) and shadow (the casts being the negative of the object itself) in a stuttered attempt at transmutation of matter and destiny.

Steering Instruments 2022 Wax cast, Deer Bone, Soil, Dander, Deer Sinew Varying Dimensions (Cast: 9" x 1")

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January 6, 2023 Turned away: a thin line of bone, a crescent sawed in half, and a sprout of soft bristled pigment are all that remain within your field of vision. Between the memory and the actual event lies an ever-decreasing borderline, which shifts and turns shape as it closes in on itself, finally self-engulfing, self-cannibalizing into a solid pearl of unquestioned imprint within the mind’s soft folds of cushioned matter (the soft inner kingdom of wispy, spiraling images and language rhythms). You hold this peripheral vision, more dreamed-of shadow than physical presence, of his right to your left, and pray the future bring the inverse: your left in his right, for this feeling of an image to become the shadow which lines his dreams (his state of utmost psychological vulnerability and sensitivity), for the hoping and future’s decree to collapse in on themselves (mirroring the collapse of memory and event) under the loyal weight of your soul’s will, pure and doubtless, which your exterior psychology (persona) has never been able to overcome. And he speaks to you in the familiar secret tongue which has not changed a lick since your first settling into the intradynamic which, after its infant stage of rubbery mutability, quickly sets itself into a basalt that will outlive both its host/builders, and perhaps is rather an ageless wellspring that only took the discovery and familiarity to recognize as eternalm phenomenon (love in its tragedy and triumph). How could you ever be convinced of true dissolution while this vein still spouts and speaks and impresses? It doesn’t feel possible because its not — it is, still; it is still occurring now in the space-time of your psychologies and the external reality through the ripples it has created, the dents it has hollowed out on the personal and soul’s joint surface, like craters in that maternal, light-reflecting earthroamer who witnesses your separate though concurrent nocturnal movements and desires. Can wish become reality, can desire bridle destiny without the performance and fakery of the act of breaking another’s, but rather coming into a fluid future which desires the same thing, which long ago planted its desire in you. Desire is not meaningless, fatherless - it is a biblical, prophesied weaving into the soul and electrified at the point of recognition, at the moment of peak event when realization of weight transpires across the landscape of the inner valley. His corporeal soul seen in the violent pastel sky of the desert on the night of such a recognition. Has he yet cognized the shape of your essence? And the joint essence, will it be seen as it was felt, flirted with, held in unending anticipation, as it was known innately at separate, or even joint moments to both? A fear continues to grow in and manipulate both minds: one of fixation and the other of a slipping away, loss of what was once indisputably excited over, body of precipiced youth responsibly holding all hopes of a future vague and endlessly changeable. The customized fears are tethered to that primeval competition of subconscious logic and bodily compulsion which overpowers the softness, lightness of the soul’s knowledge, creating tragedy when cooperation fails.

To have and to hold are two separate things indeed.

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In Conversation with Candido Crespo by Olivia Rose

I had the pleasure of interviewing Candido Crespo, educator, artist, father, advocate, community liaison, podcast host, and founder of CreativiDAD. Crespo graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 2006 with a degree in Art Education. He currently works as a visual arts educator in Central Islip Schools, an education ambassador at KnownOrigin.io, and at CreativiDAD Projects. In our interview we covered the complicated relationship with identity, how one’s work and priorities may alter as one grows up, the journey of an art educator, and Crespo’s phenomenal project, CreativiDAD.

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As an art education major, navigating the balance between educator and artist was a difficult but worthwhile lesson for Crespo. To be an art educator is to take on a tremendous amount of roles. Fatherhood added another layer to this balance, and, yet, Crespo still managed to be present for himself and his students.

“As an art education major, I didn’t spend a lot of time in any studio. In fact, we did a lot more curriculum planning, lesson planning. The short amount of time that I did spend in a studio, it took me aback. I wondered, what if I pursued my MFA? Or what if I concentrated in or tried to double major at the time? And, let me be clear about being an artist, I didn’t feel like I associated with that title until after I graduated. Entering the profession of art education, as a man of color—I’m Puerto Rican—the identity conversation is one that I’m still learning myself. Because every day, I feel maybe more comfortable associating myself as a black man, maybe some days I feel comfortable associating myself as Latinx. But, ultimately, what happened as a man of color in art education, was that the responsibilities stacked. I thought it was walking into a building to teach art, I didn’t realize that I was also going to embody the role of big brother, a mentor, and role model. I didn’t know that I was going to be confronted with things that other teachers wouldn’t be, because of the connection that the students felt with me. I’m in a neighboring district to the one I graduated from, so the demographics are the same. That was intentional. I wanted to go back home. As the political climate changes, and, because I’ve been living in this realm the entire time when change happens, I’m able to say, “Yes! We’ve been asking for that.” But, it’s been an uphill battle for me the entire time. This is something that I’ve been trying to call to attention. I think what happens in some of these types of districts, too, is that there’s complacency and diversity. Because you can say, “Well, we’ve always known we have a diverse demographic,” but that doesn’t mean that the way you’re serving them is appropriate. Being a father makes me really lock into the profession, but also helps me disconnect. When I’m here, I’m giving, you know, my absolute best and I’m present, and I want to be everything that the students need me to be.

But then when I go home, I need to be a husband and a father.”

The subject of identity is something I wanted to delve into further with Crespo. To call oneself an artist can be incredibly difficult for creatives. It begs the question, do I really deserve this title? Am I good enough?

“I think this happens to non-readers—you receive an assignment, and then you read the book, and you hate the book. You hate writing the paper that comes afterwards. You don’t get to enjoy the book, which could have been great, but, because it was an assignment, you didn’t get to enjoy it. Then, one day, somebody tells you, ‘You should check out this book!’ You have a lot of time, and you read the book. Finally, you’re like, ‘Damn, that book was fantastic.’ That is me with art. I was doing all my assignments, trying to fulfill requirements and trying to get things done for a teacher to make them happy, even though I had great relationships with the teacher. But, because of my problem with authority and my problem with grades, I didn’t enjoy it. Then, one day, I wanted to make a gift for somebody, and I wanted to explore some materials that I had leftover. Then, I’m drawing, I’m painting. I think, ‘Oh, shit! I really enjoy this!’ I found myself painting with friends. It became more of a social experiment. I’m there hanging out and creating work. Then, I wanted to participate in an exhibition. But, you can’t just participate in an exhibition if you haven’t had experience before; or, if you don’t have some type of network. So, I created a collective, found a place, and curated an event.

Now, I’m rocking and rolling. I am an artist, and I am present. I had to take control of that title. I 174

Bodega of Horrors 2022 Block Printing

didn’t feel like an artist. Being called an artist wasn’t like a nickname for me. You know, ‘Oh, my name is Candido, but my family calls me Dio.’ That was given to me—I didn’t choose that. But, the title of artist, I felt like I had to choose that for myself. Art was never part of the plan. And then it became so after I became an adult. Becoming a parent has elevated that desire to want to be an artist because my son loves it too. This is pretty new, but he just recently started listing off his favorite artists, and he includes my name everytime. He says, “I love Warhol. I love Keith Haring. I love Mo Williams, and I love my dad.”

The alteration of Crespo’s life after becoming a father (to a very sweet art-loving son) was the catalyst for his creation of the project CreativiDAD. The CreativiDAD project is an exploration of the impact of creativity on the relationship between father and child. It is a project one can hear his enthusiasm for in his tone while discussing it.

Crespo says, “I saw so much success in how [artistic projects] were able to develop a relationship with my son.

This project is about knowing the power of creativity. My son and I communicate through artwork now. If he’s frustrated, he can draw how he feels, and he can tell me, “This is how mad I am.” That’s one of the things that we have constant problems with—the generational gap and communication between any generation. But creativity is a tool that can be used between a parent and a child. So, I decided to share this with other dads. I said specifically dads because there’s a lot of “Mommy and Me” events. The “Daddy and Me” perspective is one that’s super interesting to me because there are cultural complexities. There is the father who is either working consistently, the father who’s not present, the absent or deadbeat dad, the dad who is present but is disconnected, or only available to coach. There are all these different stereotypical versions of a father, and I’m thinking to myself “I 175

Fatherhood 2022 Block Printing

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Vejigante 2023 Digital Drawing

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bet if I gave these dads, no matter which category they fall into, a tool they can use, maybe it would strengthen or reconnect their families.” I’m jumping around between public libraries in different communities, and just giving this project a try. I have gotten some pretty positive feedback, and it’s encouraged me to keep pushing. It’s also led to presentations, where groups, like the Office of Mental Health Training departments, are asking me to come in and describe what my experience has been like. I didn’t think I would go down the art therapy route, but, in this case, people are seeking me out. Because they say, “Well, what you’re doing is healing, and you’re using the thing that you love to tell other people how to do it.” We received two grants recently. One from a project out of Mexico, I’ll use their story and the artwork to create a workshop. I’m also going to be creating a mobile street art cart. Accessibility is at the center of all this. I think what happens with art, whether it’s resources or the physical act of setting up and cleaning up, it’s problematic. Let’s face it, there’s components of art that are just problematic. I removed that for these families. They don’t have to get the materials, I’ve given it to them. They don’t have to set it up, I’m doing that.

They don’t have to clean up because I’m doing that for them as well. Families can come in and pour their absolute all into this one hour workshop where they can relinquish control. There’s a level playing field between all the members of the family that are involved. Then, there’s also learning happening for me, learning from these dads how they interact with their families, and learning just how powerful art is.”

Art is powerful; anyone studying the field understands its impact. However, as one travels through the art world, priorities and desires shift. One may have gone to school for painting, but after graduating fallen in love with ceramics.

“I am consumed by printmaking right now. Watercolor is my favorite, though—I’ve had a bizarre relationship with that. I remember at one exhibition, a woman came up to me, and she was looking at one of my watercolor pieces. And, she said, “Oh, I was so surprised. I thought that the artist of this was a woman because it’s so feminine!” That sparked its own conversation. I was already in tune with everything that I needed to be as a person at that time. So, it didn’t throw me for a loop. But, I remember, at a younger age, that would have probably stopped me from using watercolor. Because of my own machismo and dealing with trying to hold on to what it would be like to be a man and all those all those gendered norms that are so fucked. But, instead this conversation motivated me because I was like, “Oh, well, you know, there should be no gender associated with a medium, that sounds so bizarre.” She was like, “well, it’s just so soft. It’s just such a gentle medium.” That didn’t stop me. My consumption with printmaking now is I want to have this mobile experience. I’ve constructed a case that just has everything I need, so I can just tear paper and I can pump these things out. I’m trying to figure out what it is like turning erasers into lino cuts. I met some people [at a craft fair] who will probably forever think that I’m just a printmaker, because that’s what they saw me doing. And they’ll never know that I do watercolor paints. I do acrylic, and I’m a digital artist.

For right now, printmaking is where my heart is.”

Crespo shares his inspiration with his students by producing work in front of them in his classrooms. His students consider him a celebrity because of this.

“I’ve always pitched this to other art teachers. If I spoke to a younger person pursuing art education, I’d tell them, ‘you can produce in the art classroom, and, it’s not frowned upon; as long as your students are working.’ You can engage with your students, if you produce in front of them, it creates this super trust that, again, not every, not every other teacher could do. I’m telling [my students] 178

‘you should try this technique inside of your artwork, because I use it and look at what I produce.’

The math teacher can’t do that. The math teacher teaching Geometry can’t necessarily say they are a mathematician. It’s still a different profession. I encourage young teachers all the time to set up a little easel in their classroom and have something of a work in progress that students can watch you work on a little bit at a time. My students love it. If I’m doing lino cuts, I just give them my artist proofs, and they love it. They tell me where it’s hanging in their room.”

Crespo is also an artist of podcasts. He is the Co-Host of "One Love Art Sessions", host of "Everyday Art Room", and has been a guest on many other podcasts. Perhaps this is why his voice is so articulate whilst discussing the art world, “I reached the point where I was interested in sharing my experience. But I didn’t really have a place that was seeking my perspective out. It just so happened, I think like many other things that when the rise, or, the revisit, of the Black Lives Matter movement, in 2020, especially in the field of art education, people became interested in my perspective. I, too, can open the doors for other voices that I feel are more impactful, or creating change in our respective field of art or art education. I was invited to a few, a few different podcasts. I enjoyed my time there, I thought it was a really cool way to connect and learn. Even as a guest, and as a host of podcasts, I’m still learning in those moments, even though I’m sharing. I asked a friend of mine, a fraternity brother of mine from undergrad, to host a pop up exhibition together in 2020 because he’s an artist as well. It’s 2020 in New York City, and we were laying the groundwork, and it was this great idea. And then, shit hits the fan. Well, we already have this momentum, what do we want to do with it? So we tried out a live event where we were inviting people we know who are artists, and we gave a theme. We said, “Let’s just invite anybody to come hang out with us, they can ask this question while we’re producing live.” But, we realized that we wanted more people to be able to listen in. So we started to record them, and this turned into One Love Art Sessions. Now it's three hosts: myself and two other gentlemen. Our goal of that podcast is to break down any walls that exist between artists and the people who love them. We want to have intimate conversations. We try to pick a general theme for the conversation and let the conversation move in that direction. We pick the theme in advance, it’s not like something that just happens from the conversation. That’s been a really great experience.”

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ALUMNI | CERAMICS 2015

Kayla Noble

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A Pot and Her Potter 2022 Woodfired Stoneware, Fruit, Digital Photography 5" x 7"

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UNDERGRAD | CERAMICS

Leo Minsky he/they

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My vessels are celebrations of my accomplishments and the hurdles I am overcoming in my transition as a trans man.

After years of living in shame and denial, I make work that acknowledges my trans identity. The narrative ceramic vessels I create serve as permanent sharps containers. Beginning hormone replacement therapy is an outcome of putting my needs as a trans person first, which is something that does not come naturally to me. The sharps I have collected from hormone replacement therapy are important milestones in my gender identity, and this body of work allows me to cherish them. As time passes, my sharps collection gets larger and the shame I carry lessens. The process of creating these vessels allows me to physically express the cycle of emotions I have as a trans man. Even though I publicly express and embrace my gender identity, I often have insecurities that I will never belong. To belong would require serenity of self and comfort in spaces; this is increasingly difficult as the feeling of isolation lives inside of me and is perpetuated by external forces.

Through making this work I give myself the opportunity to no longer pretend like I do not exist. Making narrative ceramic sharps containers fulfills my desire for transparency, dignity, and authenticity.

I AM SO GLAD MY SHAME HAS DIED 2022 Soda Fired Stoneware 11" x 8"x 8"

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UNDERGRAD | DRAWING/PAINTING

Parker Parenti he/him

The fridge holds our food, keeps us alive, and serves as a communal space on which we display our lives and personalities through photographs, notes, lists, artwork, reminders, and whatever else we choose to stick on it. It’s ubiquitous, as vague as it is specific, and as general as it is personal. It often plays the role of a figure in my work, usually a stand-in for myself.

I utilize the imagery of the fridge and the objects we put on it by combining painting, collage, and occasional sculptural elements to show how things and people change (or remain the same) over time.

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Self-portrait 2022 Acrylic and Gouache on Paper 50" x 27" 186

Colophon The fourth issue of Assembly was designed by BFA Graphic Design student, Ally Burgarella. The journal was created in InDesign and published by Issuu.

The type is set in Proxima Nova and Baskerville.

Assembly was produced by the following students in Professor Michael Asbill's Assembly Art Journal class: Editorial team: Kara Butler, Eoin Dennis, Olivia Rose, and Earl Thomasson.

Curatorial team: Rachel Gee, Grace Lindenfelser, Joli Perfit, and Myah Perino.

Outreach team: Niamh Doherty and Pearl Woytovich.

Design team: Ally Burgarella, Raphiel O'Connor, and Lily Tang.

The Assembly team would like to thank Fine & Performing Arts Dean Jeni Morken and Department of Art Chair Thomas Albrecht for their crucial support. We greatly appreciate Emilie Houssart for proofreading the issue.

Thank you to everyone who submitted to the journal for sharing their inspirational work.

Assembly is the art journal of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

fleS deretlA 4 eussI

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