The work of both artists questions how to capture and represent the world within a system wrought with institutionalized inequity for the sake of capital gain. Bienko’s imagery of designer brands and luxury watches are accompanied by cartoon figures and tigers whose facial expressions contain a complex array of emotional states. Merriweather’s sculptural and collage works vary in material and image, expressing the inextricable connection between culture and commerce, and the colonial steppingstones we continue to walk on toward late capitalism. The strength of this show is not in the works didacticism, but the works ability to present problems, with incomplete answers. It is in our willingness to accept incompleteness that we can near the orbit of truth...
Elysia Mann’s Long Long Game Game at the Wilson Gallery, Georgetown College
At the age of 16 Albert Einstein famously imagined what it would be like to travel on the front end of a light beam. Despite the fixed speed of light of 299,792,458 meters per second, he discovered that our perception of time is relative depending on our unique position in space. While illustrating the science of Einstein’s theory is extracurricular for our purposes, it serves as a useful picture for entering Elysia Mann’s current exhibition Long Long Game Game at The Wilson Gallery at Georgetown College. Through a combination of various materials, images, text, macro, and micro scales, Mann considers the biggest questions of life and death through the lens of play. In this regard, play mustn’t be brushed off as mere frivolity, but rather celebrated as a pillar of imaginative thinking, especially when considering the creative capacity of thinkers such as Einstein…
Scraps of Geography
In her recent collection of poems Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems, Cheng explores the border and border-lessness between the body and home, mythology and memory, and the vastly deep internal experience of living a life. When reading Cheng’s work, I am reminded of floating upon water, gazing skyward, ears submerged in a space that allows me to hear inside my own body. The sound appears like echoes from the outside, dampened by the edges of the container I am in, my skin perhaps, as I pick up traces of the external world…
Two Birds One Stone: Teaching Contemporary Practices in Introductory Studio Courses
In 1815, a cataclysmic volcano erupted on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia.
Researchers have found the disaster of Mount Tambora to be the cause of monumental weather conditions across the globe. The weather shift is speculated to have caused a number of surprising consequences, such as food shortages, migration in North America, agricultural ruin leading to Chinese opioid production, and even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Bragg, Citation2016). While the work we do as teachers is microscopic compared to the effects of Mount Tambora (and also hopefully much more encouraging), the anecdote is useful for recognizing how the effects of teaching stretch beyond our targeted learning objectives. This article presents an example of how to broaden our reach as educators…
Museum Misalignments
Every day we make countless attempts to memorialize our experiences. We snap photographs, collect objects from our travels, write journals, build shrines, and spend hours re-imagining past events. As a society, we hoard precious objects in museums, build altar pieces, share funerary rituals, and canonize stories in books and theater. Memorialization is a response to our daily confrontation with loss. As our experiences evaporate we seek to compensate through various forms of representation. Any attempt to depict history or illustrate our observations is a romanticized abstraction, disclosing a human longing to preserve…
NEW DAY
Consider the experience of an archaeologist: the sensation of being immersed in earthen substances and the ceaseless curiosity that keeps one searching. Imagine clay and grime under your fingernails, the damp smell of a cavernous hole in the ground, and the inexplicable wonder upon discovering a hidden mystery preserved in the earth. In addition to the associations we have with the physical acts of archaeological digging, think of what it means to be doing archaeology: to investigate and search for evidence of the past in order to learn more about ourselves in the present...