The Un-Show: University of Delaware Graduating MFA and BFA Students Respond to 79 Days of Quarantine

Airing May 29 – June 29, 2020

Playing 4 Keeps by the Master of Fine Arts Students – 6-10PM (ET) on Sat, Mon, Wed
Excerpt by the Fine Art Bachelor of Fine Art Students – 6-10PM (ET) on Sun, Tues, Thurs
See both screenings in succession Fridays from 6-10 PM (ET)

Coinciding with what would have been a public celebration of completion, The Un-Show attempts to fill a void where a physical thesis show, convocation, and university graduation commencement once stood. There is no reason to pretend things are normal. We are not even sure we ever knew what normal was, but now, things are most definitely not what they were this time last year. For that reason we decided to accept the fact that we would not be able to hold a public exhibition of our students’ work in a gallery. We decided instead to host The Un-Show, an archive of how our students respond to learning from home during a pandemic and a celebration of their accomplishments.

The videos streaming this month are made by a diverse group of makers—undergraduates and graduates—who create and think with materials and concepts that vary widely. Only four of the students in this un-show consider themselves artists who use video as their primary medium. We have asked students who choose to work with wood, metal, fabric, clay, paint, ink on paper, charcoal, chemical and digital photography, found materials, and digital illustration to pick up a camera, a cell phone, or use the zoom camera to document how they are making (and if they are making) while sheltering in place. We have asked them to tell us why it is virtually impossible to really see and understand their work from a screen. Each of them has responded in their unique way.

catalogue design & illustrations, srd | 2020

This group of students, diverse in age, experience, and location, have come together over the course of the last two to four years around the development of their creative practice and critical discourse. They have come from their various homes to the University of Delaware to utilize studio space, to have access to equipment for making, and to come together to critically engage each other’s practices—meeting with faculty, visiting artists, and discussing critical readings—all in the hopes of helping each other to think more deeply about their work and to realize their varied visions. What should have felt like the culmination of those years of dedicating themselves to their artistic education, of course, has been turned upside-down by a global pandemic the likes of which none of us has experienced in our lifetime. There is nothing “fair” about a global pandemic, but this group will not get the closure that they deserve. They have not been able to be in their studios for the last two months, they have met, like the rest of us, remotely to try to continue the conversation that they had developed, they have seen their various advisors on a screen, and they have tried to find creative ways to continue to develop a practice in the midst of a country-wide shut-down. The graduate students have been asked to deliver the courses that they were teaching on-line and they all have been forced to have their thesis show, the place where they get to celebrate their work with each other and family and friends, on-line.

So, in these extraordinary circumstances, and while we appreciate and are so impressed by their flexibility, creativity, and ability to adapt, we have also asked them to use this as a time to reflect on their practice, and to also resist. To resist the idea, that while everything can be posted on-line, not everything should be experienced on a screen. How might they be able to reflect on what, about their work, cannot be experienced on a screen? What are the unique qualities of the way their work acts on the senses, relating to a viewer’s body? How do they choose scale, or the way that even the most image driven work is still put into a space, lit in a particular way, arranged to be experienced by the senses of an embodied viewer/listener…hell, smeller… So rather than create an array of images our graduating Masters of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts students were asked to make a short video of their “art,” whatever that may look like at this time, and as a way to think about and document this unprecedented time that was supposed to be their time to share their art with the public.

– Lance Winn, Graduate Director and Professor of Art, University of Delaware
Amy Hicks, Associate Chair and Associate Professor of Art, University of Delaware

2020 University of Delaware MFA Exhibition Catalogue

MFA VIDEO PROGRAM:

Caleb Weiss
Looking at a Painting, 2020, 2:54 min
calebweiss.com

Sarah Hunter
Sears Tower Implosion-Philadelphia 1994 (III), 2020, 2:53 min
Sarah Hunter is a Philadelphia based visual artist working primarily in oil paint and graphite media. In my recent work I have been exploring ideas of change over time, specifically thinking about how places accumulate and can hold various stories at once. This video documents the beginnings of a small drawing, part of a series based on YouTube stills. Using graphite as well as eraser techniques I am contemplating what the existence, removal and remembrance of built structures can mean to the essence of a place and its inhabitants.

Jacob Cage
Respiratory, 2020, 1:38 min
Jacob Cage is a visual artist rooted in two-dimensional media exploring ideas of consciousness, perception, and the experiential. By utilizing color, form, and illusion his work resonates between physical and conscious landscapes in creating a unified presence. Originally from New Jersey, Jacob received his BFA from Florida State University with a focus in painting and design.

Ken Beidler
Garage Assemblage, 2020, 5:28 min
Ken Beidler is a Philadelphia based visual artist working with a variety of materials. With roots in ceramic processes and traditions, his work explores through installations and assemblages how the natural world and human culture are layered in complex interconnected systems. Using the formal vocabularies suggested by these everyday realities, material objects, both found and made, are smushed, layered and piled up evoking landfills, geological layers and archeological sites.

Jason Austin
1999, 2020, 1:59 min
Originally from New Jersey, Jason Austin’s work consists of narrative storytelling in mediums such as acrylics, oil pastels, and charcoal. 1999 is a series of charcoal drawings that will later become pages for a graphic novel. The story centers around a time traveler who goes back in time to save his girlfriend from a deadly meteor shower that unleashes a global extraterrestrial pandemic.

Anna Marciniak
Hands from the My Chemical Romance Series, 2020, 4:07 min
Marciniak works the space between the does/doesn’t, the is\isn’t- the place of most possibility. There is a polytonality inherent in triteness of expression projected beyond itself into another awareness or space. As a sculptor, Marciniak harnesses the power of light and shadow to communicate in different ways. Through language and physicality, using laughter, fun, and nonsense to subvert her intent, things are both what they appear to be- and yet they are not. By using light as an object she blurs the lines between the intangible and the physical, composing her own story.

Arnaud Perret
On The Linearity of Time, 2020, 4:18 min
I am an artist who uses a variety of media but who has a predilection for creative processes based on photography. My work is influenced by the western aesthetical and theoretical traditions, but it vacillates between formalism and thematic reflections, between realistic and ethereal imagery, and between ontological considerations and the need for expression. I tend to think of my artistic production as a form of visual poetry to explore the sensible through time.

Cody J. Graham
You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me, 2020, 2:46 min
Philadelphia based interdisciplinary artist, Cody Graham, works mainly in alternative photographic processes, printmaking, and textiles. Through these processes he creates objects such as tapestries, collages, quilts, and both fabric and paper prints that explore intimacy, sexuality, and desire. Originally from Delaware, he is currently pursuing his MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Delaware and received his BFA in Photography at Tyler School of art at Temple University. He maintains an active CV in national and international exhibitions and publications. In 2017, he completed the Fabric Workshop and Museum apprentice program.

Rob Lesher
Untitled, 2020, 32:00 min
Artist teacher parent husband trying to stay sane. A set up for failure, given a task without the means for success doomed to be destroyed by its purpose.

2020 University of Delaware BFA Exhibition Catalogue

BFA VIDEO PROGRAM:

Zoom Session with BFA Seniors in ART419 Senior Studio, May 2020, 13:26 min
What does it mean to you to be known as the class of COVID-19?

Xander Opiyo
Portrait, 2019, 2:47 min
Xander Opiyo is a multidisciplinary creative treading the fine line between conceptual fine art and commercial mixed-media experimentation. This experimental short serves as a self-portrait of intrapersonal emotional and psychological battles. Through this project he captures his current headspace as a young adult and learning artist, one full of conflicting emotions, ideas, and worries.

Kenzie Walsh
Class of Covid 19, 2020, 2:36 min
Kenzie is a graphic designer stumbling through the art world. She works in vectors, video, and painting. This video is of her rambling about the pains and sufferings of social distancing along with how we cope while creating a vector graphic portrait.

Rachel Silver
Fidelia, 2019, 3:11 min
Rachel Silver is a visual artist focusing on the use of photo, video and illustration as a means of storytelling. Broadly, her work encompasses the feelings of feminine trauma and healing, often pointing the camera towards herself. Using a fictional narrative approach, Fidelia touches on the woes of a rather private woman not understood by her community, enshrouded in a thin veil of humor and wonder.

Sierra Watkins
Pandemic Emotions, 2020, 1:50 min
Sierra Watkins creates photos and videos to immortalize special moments in people’s lives. In this short video, Sierra focuses on her conflicting emotions during quarantine.

Deanna Marino
Heavenly Bodies parts I-III, 2020, 1:31 min
Marino is a sculptor with a focus on larger-than-life, interactive fantasy designs. Marino’s thesis is centered on a long-held passion for fabric sculpture, channeled into historically-inspired clothing/costume with highly stylized and romanticized themes. All of Marino’s designs are fully wearable and uniquely draped pieces, meant to bring out our closely guarded and cherished inner imaginative worlds.

Olivia Carlucci
Euphoria, 2020, 00:35 min
Liv Carlucci is a New York based illustrator, painter, photographer, digital designer and screenprinter. In Euphoria, Liv illustrates her love for color and expressing human emotion using colored pencils and sharpie.

Sierra Bacon
Divine Bath, 2020, 4:08 min
Sierra makes vibrantly intimate video essays to reclaim and explore past personal experiences as a way to address uncomfortable social topics. All of the spoken word in this video stems from conversations with friends and family. Those discussions gradually morphed into private interviews. In Divine Bath she focuses on rape culture through spoken word poetry, addressing the emotional and psychological impacts, as well as the road to healing.

William Segura
Me, Myself, and I, 2020, 1:29 min
William Segura enjoys releasing digital media works created through the power of technology. However, his love for technology may be a bit over the line. The short video created through illustrations and coding in processing exaggerates our artists love of technology through a suspenseful and chaotic narrative.

John Sebastian Velasquez
Making the Juggler, 2020, 00:28 min
John Sebastián Velásquez creates sculpture from found objects and industrial materials such as steel, wood, and concrete in order to explore the complexity of human relationships. During the shelter in place order, he began printing on materials found in his home.

Amanda Gerhart
All my friends, 2020, 00:32 min
Amanda Gerhart is a painter, illustrator, and designer from Newark, Delaware. She paints events, people, and objects that do not physically exist. Painting directly onto the surface, Amanda focuses on cognitive conflicts, perseverance, and current social issues in her surreal paintings.

Lauren Gaston
Pacing, 2020, 1:21 min
Lauren Gaston primarily works in ceramics and printmaking, exploring psychological concepts and telling stories through her work. In Pacing, Lauren focuses on the current quarantine situation. The visuals express some of the aspects of being confined.

John Halligan
Entrapment, Who Cares If It Kills, and Standards of Society, 2020, 00:25 min
Based in New Jersey, John Halligan makes sculpture about self worth, entrapment and living in a society full of toxic masculinity. He works with wood and steel.

Rong Sun
Japanese Samurai, 2020, 00:26 min
Rong Sun works on drawing, painting and digital illustration, investigating the diversity and history of weapons. In Japanese Samurai, Rong focuses on the aesthetic of traditional japanese armor and sword, showing the brave and precise soul of samurai.

Emma Lesnevich
Primary Feelings, 2020, 03:45 min
Emma Lesnevich is a painter whose work is focused on deconstructing the figure in order to understand the human condition. Through the lens of psychology, they use color, gesture, and brushstroke to express connections between the mind and body.

Jacob McKenna
Propandemiganda, 2020, 00:32 min
Jake McKenna is a creative writer and designer who creates humorous works intended to point out the absurdities in life. Finding the strange and unordinary in the mundane, he writes from his experiences and observations of the world he lives in. His coronavirus-inspired works are a critique of the illogical responses by the public to living during a pandemic. Jake uses a retro style to compare the influence of social media to propaganda advertising.

catalogue design & illustrations, srd | 2020

Kat Rumas, I feel like i am.. DIS IN TE GRA TING, 2020

Driftless Body in the Virtual World
Airing May 8-14, 2020

A video program created from Sara Condo‘s UIC class Physical Body: Virtual Worlds

Now, more than ever, is a time to reflect on the place of our bodies, and the complicated ways in which they relate to the space around them. Before Covid-19, it was already increasingly obvious how virtualized the spaces (and the bodies inside them) were becoming. Now, with so many of us confined to narrow physical parameters on a daily basis, the act of moving through digital spaces, both as replacement for and supplement to the displaced physical realm we cannot access, requires a level of attention we’re only just beginning to embody.

Unsurprisingly, making art is one of the best ways to think through these uncertainties. Even if a work of art doesn’t have an answer to the many questions raised by confusing circumstances, it can still orient our emotions, begin to solidify the incoherence of first contact with the unknown. It’s a process that’s reflected in the works on display in this program, all created in a course at the University of Illinois at Chicago called Physical Body: Virtual Worlds. Throughout the semester, we’ve already begun to investigate the fracturing of physicality and embodiment as it drifts from physical to virtual and back again. Only in the last two months have those explorations gained full purchase on the moment, accelerating trends already happening to a degree that these issues have become inescapable.

In one of our last IRL classes, we discussed the opening chapter to Arthur Kroker’s Body Drift: Butler, Hayes, Haraway. Kroker suggests that we already live through a multiplicity of bodies, that it “is how we circulate so effortlessly from one medium of communication to another.” In the moment, as the physical extent of our bodies has rapidly diminished, the other bodies we experience become even more apparent, a feeling reflected in a number of works playing in this program. For example, in Angelica Mendoza’s Virtual Nexus Mix 2020, we can see the ways in which the virtualization of the club that’s emerged in the last few months was already underway in recent years, as cell phone videos changed what it meant to see and be seen in public. As a requiem to a club that’s already seen its doors close before, it also serves as a preemptive mourning for the further loss of physical space we’ll likely see as different third spaces fail to make rent payments in the months and years ahead. All the same, to mourn the physical club through dance, and to see and be seen in the eye of a Zoom call, reminds us that something of our physical world still lives in each networked connection, even as we continue an ambivalent dance across our dispersed physical forms.

Jeffery Stahl, Lonely Raver, 2020

The same impulse is present in numerous other works. In Jeffrey Stahl’s Lonely Raver, we see a similar lament for the missing club. Dancing alone in the woods, masked but otherwise prepared for a party that will never arrive (or will it?), the video asks: if a raver dances in the woods, but we can only watch on YouTube, did the rave really happen? Elsewhere, in Kat Rumas’s I feel like I am… DIS IN TE GRA TING, we see the horror of the glitched-out video call, taken to the point of existential dread: what happens when social distancing tears us apart from our core instincts, to live independently and to rebel against authority? The piece offers no easy answers, but viewers will likely see their own despair reflected in Rumas’s pained, glitched expression, the prospect of another Zoom happy hour enough to make one long for even the shittiest dive bar, now unavailable for the foreseeable future. 

Today, the virtual experience and the physical experience are one and the same, demanding correspondingly conscious interpretations. The way one experiences the physical world is processed and interpreted through a virtual-like system which is your consciousness. To determine a distinction between the pair is like trying to make a distinction between space and time. It all depends on your perspective.

Experiences, virtual or embodied, are processed through prisms of one’s perspective. Our minds process physical moments we observe and absorb, within seconds, becoming unique memories. Like a file amidst data in a computer program. As we process information, experiences, and memories throughout time, and defragment. Files condensed. Keeping the meaningful, most important moments. A sibling’s laugh, a mother’s embrace. As well as deleting files,  so the system operations remain stable. In addition, our files of memory and experiences can be reconstructed, filed in certain folders and revised, altered, or relocated as time passes. The most present versions are one’s perceived reality, subject to change.

– Curatorial Text Written by : Ramsey Hoey + Annie Howard

PROGRAM

Ramsey Hoey
Tunnel, 2020, 2:20 min

Experiencing isolation feels like an endless tunnel. Beauty and terror. What will be the ripple effect? The endless tunnel extends into our coping mechanisms. We are told to start making everyday routines so that the time spent alone does not seem too long. Repeat until ….

Angelica Mendoza
Virtual Nexus Mix 2020, 2020, 1:50 min

This piece is a short video that encompasses experiences of Neo nightclub before and after the club closed in 2015, as well as the spin the 2020 quarantines have imposed on the nightlife scene. I used appropriated video footage to show contrasting moments in time of Neo patrons. Virtual Nexus Mix 2020 (1:49) is a mashup of an event that used to take place at Neo that is currently running virtually, and my participation in it. The video grapples with loss, memory, and an attempt to relive a bodily experience that was once taken for granted.

Jeffery Stahl
Lonely Raver, 2020, 2:44 min

My latest song is titled Lonely Raver inspired by isolation from my loved ones and friends. As much as I hate to complain, coronavirus quarantine has been really lonely and depressing for me. I’m sort of shut off from the world asides from the internet. Physically and socially I’m away from the community of people who inspire me the most and frequently collaborate with. This has been difficult for me and I think Lonely Raver is my ballad that expresses that. It’s all about loneliness and isolation.

Lisette Bustamante
Heart Beat Purse, 2020, 40 sec

For my final project I created a purse that is able to detect your pulse. The purse is made from reusable material. The heart beat sensor is created with an Arduino Uno board, a pulse sensor, and an LCD screen. The project aims to bring practical functions to an experimental wearable platform. Grouping formal aesthetics and technical forms

Anastasia Sitnikova
Coordinated Sabotage, 2020, 4:54 min

In this project, I’m stitching together different facets of my current reality actual, imaginary, and constructed. All these three realms coexist in the same moment of time, history and situation. The park is the only recreational facility nearby that remains open. It became our new family ritual to go there every evening for a 4-mile hike, the same route every day. Buffalo Creek used to be a farmland. Since 1980s, it has been being slowly restored to its original state of tallgrass prairie and wetlands. The park has a dual function. Besides being a forest preserve, it is also used for flood control. During the last two years it went through the reservoir expansion project. The land still looks very disturbed, somewhere in between being beautiful and ugly, natural and artificial.

The dialogues were recorded during those evening hikes. Spending most time now in the virtual space with virtual teachers, virtual friends, and virtual games, the children usually discuss what has the most urgency in their reality. Long hikes give them an opportunity to turn from the screen and spend some face-to-face time together. The boys were aware that I was recording them, but I didn’t direct or moderate their conversation in any way. Hours of recording went through a distillation process, when I listen carefully and many times before I got to the core, which strangely mirrors the adult world.

The white room is an interim transitional space. It did exist, because I built it. It didn’t exist, because I’m the only person who has ever been there. This space is blank, it can be anything or nothing. The sound makes it a continuation of the park, or a rest area, a place of temporary relief. I expected a room wrapped in plastic would evoke suffocation and remind a body bag. In fact, it happened to be much calmer. Maxim compared this space with paradise.

Kat Rumas
I feel like i am.. DIS IN TE GRA TING, 2020, 4:15 min

I feel like I am… DIS IN TE GRA TING is a personal response to the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is meant to communicate how I have been feeling lately due to social isolation and inability to live life how I usually would. Through this piece I wanted to communicate my emotional state, which I feel has been worsening overtime, hence the word, “disintegrating”. I feel like lots of freedoms have been restricted or taken away completely, which is damaging to my rebellious spirit. There is absolutely nothing one can do but stay at home and follow whatever orders political heads and health officials communicate to the public during this time. Because of this, I, as I’m sure everyone else to an extent, feels stuck, depressed, unmotivated, and wishing for life to return back to normal. There is also fear in considering adaptation of a “new normal”, as this draws in existential thought. I feel disconnected in various ways, conceptually connecting various distortions in the piece.

Annie Howard
Rats as Subjectvity: An Inquiry, 2020, 6:40 min

Rats as Subjectivity: An Inquiry is a video essay, exploring a journey to understand subjectivity as experienced in urban space. It’s a years-long project, an adaptation of an essay first written in late 2017 or early 2018, extended with new writing and footage both filmed and collected from the internet. As the title suggests, the central hypothesis guiding the narrative is tentative, uncertain, a reflection of accumulated experience that’s nonetheless still unfolding. As an outlook on existence, it suggests plurality, inner conflict, and a sense of perpetual becoming that’s been essential to my understanding of identity formation. Despite that, the act of returning to this essay and connecting the various clips to each word revealed the enduring sense of meaning that this perspective has granted me over the last few years. It does about as good of a job explaining a sense of self-understanding as anything else I could possibly offer; what others choose to do with that information, and how it changes their perception of my being, is out of my hands.

Riis Freivogel
SLEEP REDUX: The Spaces in Between All Look the Same, 2020, 21:30 min
For this project, I took my midterm and redid it under conditions I liked more, and edited it differently. I wanted to find a way to exemplify and dramatize what it’s like to dissociate. People liken dissociation to the feeling of driving for a while and forgetting how you get where you are. Knowing you drove, but not remembering the drive itself. I think it’s a good analogy, so I chose that theme as central to my project. I used static to represent the parts of the drive that were more monotonous. The parts one might forget. I also had the camera mounted where a passenger would sit, instead of mounting it above my head or to my body. I wanted to show what it’s like to feel like you’re out of your body, as if you were an observer of the person in your body. That’s how I feel when I’m driving or doing something else boring, challenging, or tedious. To capture this, I made the camera my own point of view when not driving.