The senior Art minor and all student show ran from March 24-April 1, with a reception on Wednesday, April 16. In case you missed it, here are some highlights from an impressive exhibition.
The Voice’s own Julia Cristofano depicted the inner workings of the human body through anatomical drawings, prints and a delicately embossed paper spine. Cristofano is an EMT who had planned to major in Biology and has “always been interested in the medical aspects and the physical makeup of the body.” She commented that through her art, she’s “tried to capture both physical systems but also the deeper parts of ourselves: thoughts, feelings, emotions, that our physical forms alone can’t convey.”
Emily Silber also explored the human body in her project, Wallflower. Silber used body paint to create black and white patterns on her mostly-nude subjects (her “very patient and adventurous friends”), who stood against a background painted in the same pattern, almost completely blending in. She then photographed them straight on, their faces stoic, with black circles around their eyes adding intensity to their gaze. Silber commented that the purpose of her work was to make a statement about conformity and individuality. She achieved this by photographing male and female subjects of varying body types, exposed but simultaneously covered by paint, in black-and-white, both obscuring and highlighting some of their most distinctive features.
Hilary Nigrosh’s work is made up of both photographs, and paintings inspired by photographs. Across the gallery, I immediately recognized the faces of Anne Frank, Amelia Earhart and Sharbat Gula, the Afghani girl with green eyes from the cover of National Geographic. Nigrosh painted likenesses of these photographs on a much larger scale and incorporated text that suggests what each woman might have been thinking. Nigrosh’s approach humanizes images that have been reproduced countless times over several decades, both through the artist’s touch and the imagined thoughts of her subjects. Nigrosh wrote in her artist statement, “With the vast expansion of technology, images are so easily reproduced that we can easily misrepresent and misinterpret the stories behind them. It can become hard to discern whether the subjects even wanted to be photographed, not to mention recognized to the point of fame.”
The other component of her work, Family Snapshots Reimagined, is a series of photographs which originated as old family slides from the ’50s and ’60s that Nigrosh found in her basement. Nigrosh then turned the slides into prints in the darkroom and toned them, again adding her own touch. “I was able to further capture a moment in time through my own lens. These ordinary family snapshots offer a glimpse into a past that I am both connected to and disconnected from,” she explained.
Phoebe Papademetriou also explored nostalgic representations of ordinary moments in her project titled Where We Are Now. Her photos are snapshots from daily life, cooking dinner with friends, hanging out in her apartment and giving a friend a haircut. She said of her decision to focus on the senior year experience: “We’re entering into this adult world, where we live on our own and cook for ourselves, but we’re still very much kids. We do these things, like cutting our friends’ hair, but it’s pretty clear that we have no idea what we’re doing.”
Papademetriou’s work features recognizable spots around campus, like Cro Bar, as well as the interior of her Winchester apartment. “I wanted them to be recognizable, but not too specific to my own life,” she said. “I always like to leave things out so that the viewer can kind of imagine their own story of what’s going on in the image.” She focuses on the best parts of senior year: enjoying the company of friends and appreciating our time as much as possible, without a sense of anxiety about what’s coming next.
Congratulations to the senior Art minors for all their hard work, and for giving the campus community an opportunity to appreciate their explorations of what it means to grow up, to be an individual and to represent and express oneself in a meaningful, authentic way.
