Becky Rosen ’13, Zara Bowden ’13 and James Boeding ’14 presented their summer work yesterday evening at the Visual Arts Department’s annual showcase of summer grant recipients.
Rosen’s show, titled “Beyond V4: Exploring Identity and Recognition,” explored prosopagnosia, or “face blindness.” Those afflicted cannot recognize individuals by their faces and must rely on other attributes such as hands, hair and gait to distinguish those around them. Rosen recieved the Kaempfer Fund Summer Art Grant.
Rosen, citing Martin Schoeller as an influence for portraiture, began by editing out the faces off of her subjects with a multitude of processes.
“This time I was more interested in how people with prosopagnosia would see,” said Rosen, explaining her process.
She then began to explore how the body can express things that the face cannot, by taking out-of-focus pictures of dancers reacting to a word.
“My pieces reflected the idea of what happens to the viewer-subject relationship when the subject can’t really interact with the subject,” said Rosen.
The title of her show comes from the part of the brain that perceives color, the V4, and the idea that much more is involved in recognizing a person.
Bowden and Boeding both recieved the McKee Summer Photography Grant. Bowden’s show, “Street Art: A Transformative Reconstruction of Tagged Space,” contemplates the relationship between art and vandalism.
She cited her influences as Banksy and Invader, well-known street artists who have both been arrested and shown their work in well-known galleries.
“Why don’t people think it’s art when they see it every day?” Bowden said. “Is it the context what makes something art? Is it content? Is it intent?”
Bowden explored and mimicked the transformative power of street art in her hometown of Fort Worth and nearby Austin, Texas. She described street art as a way of reclaiming common societal spaces, creating dual ownership and an interactive dialogue.
“Street art inevitably changes the way we approach spaces,” Bowden said.
Bowden’s exhibit includes photographs dry mounted, without frames or matting. Bowden says she wanted the shapes of the street art in the photographs to interact with the space and become a part of the walls.
Boeding’s show, “The Weekender; New York City to Millerton,” catalogued the experience of commuting between city and country.
A native of Millerton, N.Y., Boeding spent the summer working in New York City, and the experience inspired his exhibit. Boeding took photographs of his surroundings at 15 minute intervals.
Upon reviewing the pictures from his five-week project, Boeding said he found many recurring events and serendipitous moments in the images. He ended up with series of people reading on the subway, and portraits through a subway window. In addition, he found many photographs that showed parallels between the city and the country.
Boeding’s exhibit will feature both photographs and a digital monitor. Boeding says he will size the prints to indicate their importance to him. The digital monitor will have every picture Boeding took this summer running continuously, and will feature three dials: one to control speed, one for the number of pictures displayed on the screen, and one for the number of pixels in the photograph.
The McKee Grant, funded by the McKee Fund for Photography, was established in 2003 to enhance the photography program within the Visual Arts Department. The grant is given to support a summer photography project.
The Kaempfer Summer Art Grant, provided through the Kaempfer Fund, also gives financial assistance for students to pursue summer projects.
Both grants are intended to encourage the winners to work independently, with the advice of a faculty member for their long-term project without a classroom setting.
Over the next six weeks, each show will be on display in the fishbowl of the Visual Arts Center. Rosen’s show is currently on display, and will be followed by Bowden’s and then Boeding’s in four weeks.