Ben Woo Ching ’16

Portrait of an artist: Laura Keller '15

If dancing were a varsity sport, Laura Keller ’15 would be the captain. As a member of Vague (jazz) and Obvious (hip-hop) and the lead choreographer of Arabesque (ballet), Keller’s life on campus revolves around dance.
“It’s a large commitment. I’m spending like 10 or 11 hours [a week] in the studio at rehearsal and then I have to spend time outside of that to choreograph as well,” said Keller. “My friends always know that I have to run off to dance in the evening.”
She said that as big a commitment as dance is for her, it’s also an escape from the rest of her day. “I can do homework in the afternoon and then take a break doing something that I love and then go back to doing homework,” she said.
Although she is a classically trained ballet dancer, Keller has been trying different types of dance her whole life.
“I’ve been dancing since I was three, just like every other girl, except I actually stuck with it,” said Keller.
“I started out doing jazz and then had to switch to ballet because I needed the ballet technique to advance in jazz and then just fell in love with ballet,” she added.
In high school, she picked up ballroom dancing when ballet became too much of a commitment.However, she added, “ballet has always been my one true love.”
At Bowdoin, Keller joined Arabesque at the beginning of her first year and Vague during the spring. She was also involved in the Salsa club during her first two years. Keller was was worried about the amount of time she was spending on dance, but she could not resist joining Obvious.
“The hip-hop group just looked like so much fun so I decided to audition and join that one as well,” said Keller.
Keller is not the only student involved in all three groups.
“There is a lot of overlap, especially this year,” said Keller. “I would say two-thirds of people in all of the groups are in at least two of the different dance groups. There are a five of us that are in all three.”
Keller added that there is a growing partnership between the dance groups.
“We’re doing a collaborative piece between those three groups. We’re doing a dance to ‘Same Love’ so it’s a little bit more of a political piece but it’s been a lot of fun,” said Keller.
“The main challenge is trying to come up with choreography that seams together all of the styles, but also is something that everyone can do,” said Keller. “So, for example, the people in the hip-hop group who don’t have any ballet training, how can we add the ballet without having it be too technically difficult?”
The piece will be performed on April 30 at the student groups performance and at the Vague show at the beginning of May.
Danae Hirsch ’14, who was the leader of Vague last semester, came up with the idea for the project. Keller mentioned that the leaders of various dance groups all liked the song and were interested in working on the piece.
“We didn’t want it to be associated with any one dance group in particular, but thought it would be a really cool thing to show the union of all of the dance groups,” Keller said.
Keller said that due to the project the groups are more connected now than ever.
“We would never have been able to pull off this collaborative piece before hand, because there were people who did each different style and that was all that they did. It is really nice to see that change happening now, from the dance community being more segmented to being more cohesive.”
She also noted the positive atmopshere the dance groups provide.
“[The dance community is] definitely a smaller group of people, but we are all very tight-knit. It’s like having my own family. I love everyone that I dance with,” said Keller.
Not only is it a small community, but it does not always get as much publicity as other groups on campus, likely because of the complexities of performing.
“For dance we need a special kind of stage, and it needs to be big enough, it takes a long time for us to prepare just one dance because it’s all choreographed by us and then we need to teach it and clean it,” said Keller.
“It’s not as popular a thing for people to see but it is definitely on the rise,” she said.

Portrait of an artist: Chelsea Shaffer '14

When Chelsea Shaffer ’14 arrived on campus her freshman year, she planned on joining the Craft Center and taking a few art classes. Luckily for the visual arts department, a few classes turned into many classes, and many classes turned into a major.
Currently taking the Senior Studio capstone course, Shaffer’s project uses footage from recent home videos and digitized old home videos to visually represent memory.
“It’s sort of predicated on the idea that oftentimes our memories are not actually memories but just recollections that we have of images we’ve seen of ourselves growing up,” said Shaffer of her work.
Shaffer says she is interested in the power of public art and its influence on passers-by. For her Public Art class last semester, she flipped all the posters in the union so that people only saw the blank backs of fliers.
“I feel like we see those every day and that space is so familiar to us that sometimes we don’t even see those posters,” she said. “I wanted to break that routine of knowing exactly what was going to be there.”
Shaffer studied abroad in Florence, Italy where she got a taste of what life would have been like at a studio art school. After considering the pros and cons, she says she’s still glad she has her liberal arts background.
“What we lack in studio space or technical instruction, we make up for in the way Bowdoin professors teach their students how to think about art and how to talk about their art,” she said. “I noticed a lot of people could make these beautiful things but they didn’t really know how to explain them or didn’t know the art historical context for what they were making.”
While abroad, Shaffer produced a piece titled “Rising” that was displayed during the Bowdoin Art Society student show.
“It was a video that superimposed images of riots onto flowing water—like a rushing river—to talk about how that impulse to violence or the mob mentality is a natural impulse and that things will gain momentum and rise up,” said Shaffer.
While Shaffer has always been interested in art, she made her decision to major in it after her experience in Sculpture II, taught by Sculptor in Residence John Bisbee.
“I really liked the experience of getting the time and space to work on one major project and really thinking about it, and having a lot of autonomy over what it was going to look like,” she said. “It also got me really interested in the idea of studio practice.”
Shaffer’s first concern when producing a new piece is its aesthetic quality.
“Very often, the actual production of the art is driven by what I find aesthetically and formally interesting. That’s the most important thing to me—what something ends up looking like,” she said. “What it means is a little bit more of a perk.”
Shaffer starts by deciding what medium to use, and says the process of creating inspires what comes after. For example, painting from photographs makes her think about what the photographs mean to her.
“For video it’s usually a little more conceptual,” said Shaffer. “I’ll have a sort of idea or sentence that I find interesting, and I’ll try to reproduce that idea in the video work.”
Recently Shaffer has become interested in community art projects and art therapy. Since she plans to teach after graduation, she hopes she can incorporate art into her job.
“I see it as a really good way to connect people, a good way to bring people together in a community and a good way to beautify a community. I think that that is a really important role of art—making a place worthwhile and a good place to live in,” said Shaffer.
For Citizenship and Religion, a course being taught at the Maine Correctional Center, Shaffer has been working on a group project with other Bowdoin students and an incarcerated student. They have been asking people to answer the question of what citizenship means to them by writing or drawing on an index card.
“There are a lot of people who are incarcerated at that facility who have been participating in the project—drawing on the cards, writing things down. It’s been really great to get that perspective,” she said. “I’m really interested to see what Bowdoin people have to say, but it’s also interesting to see this whole other group of people who have a lot at stake in their own citizenship and how they would respond to that.”
To Shaffer, the beauty of this project is that it provides people in the facility with an outlet for creativity.
“Maybe people don’t get to see their drawings or read their poetry or read their writing because they are incarcerated, but this way they have a chance to sort of express themselves and have it reach a broad audience,” she said.
Shaffer’s video work can be seen in the Senior Studio show on May 2, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Her citizenship project will also be displayed in the Fishbowl Gallery in the Visual Arts Center next weekend.

Portrait of an artist

April 11, 2014

Both athlete and artist, Ben Woo Ching ’16 is combining his interests into a photography project showcasing nude athletes in a celebration of the body.

Woo Ching was inspired by the annual ESPN “Body Issue” which focuses on the forms of world-class athletes.

Woo Ching, a member of the football and track teams, wants to celebrate the effort Bowdoin athletes—approximately 30 percent of the student body—put into building their bodies.

“Knowing how much work it is to put in between practice, film, lifting, conditioning in the mornings, games on the weekends and then school and or work on top of that—knowing all of that, I thought why not try to capture that in an image and really give credit,” said Woo Ching.
The photo shoot will be produced entirely in black and white film. In Woo Ching’s opinion, the style is perfect for capturing the details of the human body.

“I thought that aimed more to the shadows that are cast from every muscle. You can really see the definition—not as precisely as a brand-new Canon, but I like that as well,” he said.

Visiting Artist-in-Residence Accra Shepp encouraged the idea for the project and allowed Woo Ching to make it into a semester-long study.

Working with film instead of digitals is a new creative challenge for Woo Ching, because the conditions for the photo must be set before the photographer pushes any buttons.

“You have 36 photos in a whole reel. I just developed four rolls of film, and I found 11 photos that I like,” he said. “It makes you more humble and makes you think more about what you’re taking an image of.”

The fact that Woo Ching is an athlete and knows his subjects personally helps to make the process easier. While he said it was initially uncomfortable to photograph his friends naked, Woo Ching has gotten the hang of it.

“We shower together at practice and at games, but when it’s just the two of you, music helps enormously,” he said. “The first shoot was completely silent, and that was so awkward.”

In general, students have been open to being photographed, but Woo Ching has been very sensitive to the comfort level of his subjects.

“That’s why I haven’t shot any girls yet. I wanted them to feel the most comfortable,” he said. “This is completely artistic and academic.”

Woo Ching has enjoyed photography so much that he is now considering a visual arts major or minor—something he never would have predicted when he came to Bowdoin from Colorado.

“The thing I like about art and especially about photography is that you have something tangible afterwards,” he said. “I get a photo to look at. I can give it away to someone and it means something to me.”

He hopes to compile photos of 12 athletes to represent the athlete population as a whole.
“I’ve chosen people from all different sports for the most part,” said Woo Ching. “Hopefully it’ll turn out to be a fair snapshot of the Bowdoin athlete.”

Although Woo Ching does not currently have plans to exhibit the photos, the Department of Athletics has expressed interest in using the photos in its offices. He hopes the photos could be displayed with biographies, since the subjects’ stories are the focus of his project.

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