On the second floor of Cummings, tucked away through a series of doors, are the senior studio spaces: a hidden world to those unfamiliar with the layout of Conn’s arts building. As someone who has had multiple classes here, I still had to zip around the printmaking studios and galleries before ducking through the right combination of doors to find the place that looks like a second home to many of the art majors. Here in the studios, a handful of the 19 senior art majors have their supplies and projects set up in individual work spaces, decorated with inspirational quotes and touches of their personalities. Coffee cups, laptops, paintbrushes, and prints ornament the desks and walls. On a nice, finally-spring day, sunlight pops in through a wall of windows facing Palmer Auditorium, making the space feel bigger than it actually is.
Hallie Selinger has a space in the back of the studio. A few of her paintings hang on the wall, two unfinished frescos resting underneath. Selinger is doing an honors thesis, which includes her artwork along with a writing component. All of the art majors’ final theses consist of art pieces that will be exhibited in Cummings beginning May 2. Honors is not required of the majors, but some, like Selinger, chose to go a step further with their work.
Selinger’s art focuses around the theme of cancer through the lens of the temporality of human beings. On the paradoxical nature of the disease, she said: “I’m interested in…how cancer can break down the body yet be growing separately from it.”
She has spent her year researching and thinking about cancer, and the attitude that humans have toward illnesses and things that can threaten our existence. “I’m looking at the fear aspect,” she said. “In a psychological, philosophical way.”
Her studio space is covered with images of brains: sketches, scientific diagrams, and even medical definitions. Hemangioblastoma. Anaplastic oligodendroglioma.
“These are two different types of brain tumors,” Selinger said. “I was particularly interested in the word ‘anaplastic’ which is used to describe tumors that are malignant and have a tendency to grow very quickly and spread to other places in the body.”
Medical terms have played an important role in Selinger’s art. “My paintings combine both recognizable elements which I have meticulously rendered as well as layers of pigments that react with one another and create a formlessness,” she said.
Selinger began experimenting at the beginning of the year with painting techniques. Through a series of contrasting colors and forms, a lot of her work “has some kind of concrete defined element, as well as pure abstraction.” The materials — different types of paint, alcohol, paint thinner and chemicals — react to one another.
“All of my work is related to life and the processes of life,” Selinger said. “It’s where my work finds itself. I was more inspired by researching than art itself. I’ve struggled with reconciling the difference between art and biological and chemical science. I want to bring those two things together in a hopefully beautiful way.”
Downstairs in the basement of Cummings — another labyrinth of music halls and studio spaces — is the ceramics lab, filled with big machines and shelves of student work.
On a Wednesday evening, Georgia Naumann places three abstract porcelain sculptures on a table. Inspired by her family’s history of jewelry making (her great-great-great-grandfather founded a company in Providence called B.A. Ballou), her pieces are modeled after vintage jewelry patents.
Her work focuses on the functional (often hidden) parts of jewelry, like clasps and the backs of earrings. “These are the parts that hold [the jewelry] together, not the ones on display. I’m taking these parts and making them the ornaments.”
“I explore the relationship between handmade and machine-made art objects,” Naumann continued. “Drawing on Pop style and steampunk personality, my work explores the role of technology in both enhancing and transforming the artist’s definition of craft.”
As part of the Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology, Naumann has combined her senior thesis for art with her senior integrative project for CAT. She uses a 3-D router and powerful 3-D modeling software “to resurrect a piece of fading history — artifacts of a creative transition — and to re-envision them through a lens, one generation removed.”
After the molds are produced, she fires, glazes and assembles each sculpture in a unique way.
“The steps have taken me a long time to perfect, not that they’re perfect,” she said. “It’s different than how people think of this technology — that it’s quick and simple and perfect each time. It really is quite a lot more complicated than that.”
Taking a less personal approach to art, Dave Shanfield has created a project driven by the role of the gym in the context of human evolution. He’s interested in the transformation of Darwinian fitness and applying natural selection to how we view and approach fitness in contemporary society.
Like Selinger, Shanfield is doing an honors thesis, which is highly interdisciplinary. His sources are “all over the place,” from Darwin to Camus and French existential philosophy to the myth of Sisyphus, “this weird book on the gym” and theories on simulation and the hyper-real.
“These totally different theories are coming together,” Shanfield said. “It’s neat seeing how they play off of each other.”
During his time at Conn, Shanfield has worked a lot with ceramics and sculpture. He’s expanded on that in his thesis, while incorporating a performance art piece, found objects and prints. For his sculpture pieces, he’s used 600-lbs (or more) of cement, concrete and steel. “Manly things,” he laughs.
I watch as Shanfield works on laying 40-plus bricks made of porcelain, which he plans to encase in cement and stack as two towers, each one feeling like pieces of a wall.
“It’s a brick wall that’s not a brick wall, but that’s acting as a brick wall,” Shanfield said. “This is how I see the gym.”
The gym “acts as a simulation of nature in term of presenting obstacles for us to complete that keep our bodies in shape. It’s presented as natural, but it’s very clearly not…it’s artificial.”
Shanfield argues that gyms present physical activity more as leisure than a product of labor — they compartmentalize fitness. “We drive to the gym, that’s kind of funny,” he said.
“It’s tempting when talking about the gym to criticize gym culture,” he continued. “That’s not at all what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to approach fitness and the gym from an evolutionary, philosophical standpoint.”
As part of the performance aspect of his thesis, Shanfield had 16 participants cycle on stationary bikes for 30 minutes each, as he recorded through time lapse on a GoPro. The artwork, Shanfield said, lies in those hours biked.
“It’s the accumulation of distance in a single space,” he said. “Seeing those people cycle nonstop illustrates the transformation of physical reality into an abstract concept.”
In the primitive world, for example, distance existed as the physical reality between two places. “Traveling from A to B involved experiencing the terrain, climate, elements and obstacles encountered on the traverse. Saying ‘I biked 10 miles today on the stationary bike’ doesn’t translate as well as we’d like to believe,” Shanfield said.
The concept of the stationary bike is actually quite paradoxical, considering that bicycles were made to move us from place to place.
Shanfield turns around and points to a deconstructed stationary bicycle that he bought on Craigslist and refurbished. “I think I’m going to hang that from the ceiling,” he says. “The bicycle exists first and foremost as a vehicle of transportation — a stationary bicycle negates this exact purpose. The next step is to hang it in mid-air. It becomes aestheticized. It’s beautiful.”
Back upstairs in the senior studios, Julia McGinley expresses her fascination with figure painting. She sits, surrounded by her canvases that incorporate printmaking and oil painting, and explains her work: “I’ve let my process drive the meaning of the work. I’m exploring our relationships to our environments. The human body is a sponge that soaks up its surroundings but influences them to the same level. I’ve used printmaking to start with an image that is clear, and then obscure it through painting.”
McGinley begins with photographs of people she knows, situated in interior places that feel comfortable to them. Some of these faces may be familiar to you as well, recognizable as students around campus.
After a printmaking process, McGinley pours oil paint on the prints, which seeps into the canvas, bringing the figures to the surface. “There’s a balance between realism and abstraction. The viewer can get lost in either. We always tend to see things that we recognize in abstraction…I think that speaks to the relationship between humans and environment.”
Colors play an important part in McGinley’s paintings. “Light is important,” she said. “It really emphasizes the internal and external experience in the environment. I like when you look at a painting and feel like it happened all at once. Then, there are these minute details that make you want to look more.”
When viewing McGinley’s pieces, human figures are easily recognizable, but there is so much more happening on the canvases that further perusal is necessary. She said, “You recognize that there is something under there that is giving life to the pieces.” •
