Fine Arts

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Angel Genares Fine Arts Senior Thesis Project
(2014) Genares, Angel
During the year, my thesis shifted from staging a live social event in the gallery to making records of such interactions. This change came about when I began working on the drawings to complement and contrast with the sculptures. I became more interested in making a record of people coming together in a medium that would allow for more control. Through drawing and sculpture, I considered how personal recollections are made. The black and white charcoal drawings are reflections of how we construct and reimagine memories through blatant erasures, redrawing, and changes in perspective. Each drawing is assembled from various sources, including photographs. The drawing of a dining room table lies flat on a six-inch platform, reorienting the table to its original spatial context, and conversing with the wall-mounted sculptures above. Together they evoke the continuous process of memory-making, and the way people come together on multiple occasions or through different points of view. Both sculptures are composed of found objects assembled on tabletops, one a nightstand and the other a dining room table. Each sculpture suggests a specific moment within the drawings. Daniel Spoerri’s “tableauxpièges” influenced the decision to mount the sculptures on the wall. This repositioning turns the sculptures into records, rather than functional tables or objects with which the viewer can physically interact. While Spoerri allowed chance to dictate the composition of each table, however, these sculptures are deliberately composed.
Angelica Ortiz Fine Arts Senior Thesis Project
(2015) Ortiz, Angelica
The idea of home has always been important to me. The three places that I consider home are East Palo Alto, California; San Ignacio, Mexico; and Haverford, Pennsylvania. Be it in a positive or negative light, these places have all become familiar to me over the years. It is this familiarity that makes me think of them as home. My landscape drawings are of locations that I am accustomed to seeing when I am in California, Mexico, and Pennsylvania. I include smaller “study” pieces and sketches that show the progression of this body of work. Working on the study pieces, I found that overall compositional direction contributes a great deal to the meaning of each place I depict. My Haverford drawing is a diagonal, my California drawing is horizontal, and my Mexico drawing doesn’t have a clear direction. The sharp diagonal in my Haverford piece leads into an unclear space, which creates an uneasy feeling. I present Mexico as an unfamiliar world, therefore I feel that the compositional direction doesn’t need to be specified. The horizontal nature in my California piece helps create a larger space that feels continuous. California, Mexico, and Haverford are very different from one another, so it is fitting that they represent different types of home for me. I depict this contrast, not only by the different types of landscapes, but also by using light and general openness of the areas I present.
Gray
(2017) Larsen, Cordelia
Haitian Vodou has long been stigmatized and tainted, warped by Western projections that connect the religion to witchcraft and death. Historically, Vodou, a syncretic religion practiced chiefly in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora, is rooted in ceremonies and offerings to spirits of lwa in an effort to bring clarity and prosperity to the lives of practitioners. Haiti’s violent history of colonization and enslavement has forced Christianity into many aspects of Vodou—for example, lwa such as Erzulie Freda and Baron Samedi are figures comparable to the Christian saints. While I was not raised to practice Vodou I have long been mystified by the stark difference in its representation in American films versus what I know to be true. My father was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and my mother has Irish and German roots. I have often felt torn between these two sides. When approaching my project, I knew that I would focus my illustrations on creating contemporary representations of Vodou spirits, while using my biracial identity as a lens. While my racial background is certainly a source of joy and pride and I feel enriched by the broad cultures it has allowed me to explore and engage with, biracial is also a word fraught with confusion as it holds anxiety, responsibility, tension, and anger. Through my senior project, I explore the broad notion of what being biracial looks and feels like, while drawing inspiration from Haitian folk art, graphic novels, contemporary artists, and Vodou. I have put heavy emphasis on themes and symbols prevalent in European paintings and Haitian folk art in an attempt to juxtapose the two very different and often clashing cultures and styles. My series also considers the different ways in which biracial students identify with and how our physical appearance often determines our selfhood. I have worked primarily in gray tones to reflect that author Naomi Zack uses the word gray to popularly refer to biracial individuals. The word gray is significant, as it is specific to a black and white racial mix. By illustrating on wood, in addition to paper, I have tried to draw attention to these materials’ middle-toned materiality and raw quality; these traits are comparable to my biracial status. In Haiti, wood charcoal is burned to fuel the majority of Haitians cooking and heating needs—but 99 percent of the forest has been lost and what little remains continues to be chipped away. In my pieces, portions of the wood have been smudged with charcoal in an attempt to imitate burn marks to reference the charcoal material itself, as it is the primary cause of deforestation in Haiti.
Marcia Lee Fine Arts Senior Thesis Project
(2016) Lee, Marcia
I am part of a generation of Asian-Americans who cannot speak the languages of their grandparents, who cannot fathom the struggles of their immigrant elders, and cannot begin to comprehend the extent of cultural disconnect between generations. This body of work is born through my yearning to understand and know my predecessors. My work is an attempt to reimagine the past and reconstruct stories that portray familial relationships and individual identities. Political disturbance and prior sibling immigration caused my mother to leave the Philippines for the United States. The loss of city paperwork in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 allowed my paternal grandfather to become, many years later, a “paper son” and gain U.S. citizenship while the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was still in place. Through intimate mediums of artist books and poetry, I create physical embodiments of family stories. I utilize the book itself as an art object as well as a vessel for images and poems, exploring the relationships between form and format to enhance the viewer’s experience of individual narratives. Furthermore, the use of artist books as a medium allows me to invoke the “storytelling” significations of the book, while utilizing the linear sequential nature of book structures to reflect movement through time. I have always been fascinated by the marriage of image, text, and sculptural form in artist books. Language is the material of the poetic art form. The narratives expressed through my artwork distort temporality to access other historical, cultural, social, and political environments. By repeating these family stories, they are renewed and relived through the reader. This thesis contributes voices to a collective “Asian-American experience” by following stories of ancestors who have carved out places for themselves and their families in the United States. I intend to preserve narratives that may otherwise disappear by recording them through my work.
The Story of Frank
(2012) Appel, Jonathan G.; Goodrich, John
My short film “The Story of Frank” is an adaptation and alteration of a story that I wrote in the spring of 2010. I was a beginner in animation, so the production of this project was a process of constant learning, trial, and error. While viewing “Frank,” one can observe different stages of my adeptness at animation. I wrote the original story during a semester of study in Kathmandu. As an outsider in a new place, I had a lot of time to slow down, mull about, think, and look around. I think this is reflected in Frank’s introspections and mannerisms, which are full of a sense of wonder, and which may defamiliarize some of life’s simplest occurrences and sensuous experiences. The procedure that I used to create Frank is classified as “hand-drawn digital animation.” I drew every frame directly into the computer using a pressure sensitive tablet and its accompanying pen.
Tracing Body and Gesture of Dance
(2014) Aguais, Camila
My moving body is the driving force of my painting and drawing. In my work, I seek to render dance by leaving a trace of my movement on the ground and constructing visual representations of movement. I read my work as maps of my own movement improvisation and dance instincts. They are maps of changes in quality of movement, position of the body, and direction in the dance. A different kind of movement or motion demands a different kind of gesture or representation on the surface of the canvas or paper. My work incorporates a wide array of methods and approaches to show different aspects of movement that are significant to me as a dancer. I use charcoal and acrylic paint on canvas and paper to combine both drawing and painting into one work. I sometimes focus more on the abstract motion of dance by painting in a more fleeting and dynamic way, and sometimes I focus more on negative space and shapes to explore composition. In whatever way my paintings and drawings emphasize a certain aspect of the dance, all remains open, gestural, and ambiguous. The surface of the painting or drawing becomes a kind of collage that illustrates elements of the dance: many small movements or larger gestures, a fragment of the body or the outline of an entire figure. These paintings and drawings serve as a broad view of parts of the body and of the gestures that create the movements in dance.
What Do You Think About When I Ask You About the Future?
(2013) Schwartz, Shayna; Li, Ying
What do you think about when asked about your future? What worries you most about the future? What gives you hope about the future? Is there a part of your past that influences your future? Was there a particular moment in your life where you were very concerned about the future? Is there a moment you can recall in which you were very certain about what you would do? Three women from different backgrounds and ages are the subjects of What are you thinking, when I ask you about the future? Each woman was interviewed using the above questions as springboards for a larger discussion, and her answers were recorded. The resulting audio is distilled into a short video segment that combines portions of the interview with animation. What are you thinking, when I ask you about the future? prompts thought about what it means to consider the abstract concept of the future. When you watch this piece, reflect upon your own answers to these questions and how they relate to the answers depicted. I am inspired by the animated biography genre, including works such as A Room Nearby by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger (a twenty-seven minute film showing five people’s stories about loneliness, based on a series of interviews), and the project Animated Minds (a series of animations using interviews with patients suffering from mental health problems to depict their experiences) directed by Andy Glynne. Hand-drawn animation is a very powerful medium in depicting intangible ideas in biographical stories. Each frame is drawn by hand, giving the piece the individualistic mark of the artist that matches the individualistic nature of the stories. The piece is labor-intensive; one second of video is twelve frames or images (12fps). It explains emotion and thought through visual metaphor. My piece draws from and includes itself in the animated biography genre. Through the medium of animation, What are you thinking, when I ask you about the future? strives to illustrate the individual perspectives about a topic that concerns us.

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