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Document Type

Open Access

Department

Visual Arts

Start Date

21-5-2021 3:00 PM

Description

Brianna Weissel Revisiting Memories

During Winter Term while taking Photography 1 and living at home, I was inspired by old photos and my surroundings. I knew I wanted to combine the past with the present as a photo project. I started with family photos taken in 2001 (with two extras from 1970 and 1991) and worked my way through old family photo albums. I lined these past photos up in the exact spot where they had been taken, only now with their current day backgrounds.

We often forget that the places where we spend our everyday lives hold many core family memories. From birthday celebrations, to holidays, to learning to ride a bike, to just everyday moments, we live life surrounded by these memories, passing them by every day, usually without noticing. It is important to cherish those moments. By revisiting these family memories, I am bringing them back to the forefront.

Dhea Kothari The Private is Political: Artistic Narratives of the Female My paintings address concepts of gender and form a critical view of the surrounding social, political and cultural issues. My recent work revolves around the day-to-day life of South Asian women and explores the heavy burden of being a woman in a patriarchal world. My work consists of miniature narratives and still life paintings that aim to capture domestic scenes in South Asia. I record the thoughts and beliefs of the people of a less progressive India and try to create parallels for a more modern India tomorrow. I collect references from the Indian miniature style of painting and vintage photographs of my family. I mostly work with oil paints and frequently incorporate layered patterns. My oil paintings honor the history of Indian miniature painting, while telling the story of my generation through political examinations of contemporary Indian society. I also work with watercolor to depict an array of female emotive powers, divinely embodied, and in the medium of printmaking to bring unrepresented goddesses to life.

Mitchell Famulare

William J. Stillman's Album 8: An Artifact of Victorian Pre-Raphaelite Encounters

Among the photographic albums of the William James Stillman Collection at Union College is Album 8, a small cloth bound album with a leather cover. An alumnus of 1848, Stillman is known for his international career as a journalist, photographer, and diplomat. From traveling from New York to London to Greece and to a variety of other corners of the globe, Stillman came to influence the political, social, and cultural scenes of the nineteenth century. Union College holds more than four-hundred prints of Stillman’s work as well as a collection of letters detailing correspondence between archaeologists, political figures, and family members, donated primarily in the 1950s and 70s by Stillman’s family. Album 8 is unique in this collection because the subject is Stillman’s second wife and Pre-Raphaelite painter, Marie Spartali.

The album consists of seventeen images of Spartali across its thirty pages; it is partially full and well-preserved. Strikingly, ten of the seventeen prints of Album 8 are works of Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the most groundbreaking portraitists of the Victorian era; Stillman’s photographic hand is absent for the majority of this artifact. The on-going research surrounding Album 8 aims to determine its objecthood in relation to Stillman’s life, the nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelite art world in England, as well as the symbolic cultural underpinnings of its contents. The sequence of the images of Spartali appear to trace the trajectory of her life from a young woman, to a Pre-Raphaelite painter, to a mother; the album looks and feels like a tribute to her. By bringing together William J. Stillman, Marie Spartali, and Julia Margaret Cameron, Album 8 allows for questions to emerge regarding its construction, Victorian costume, Stillman’s personal life, transnational identity, as well as Spartali’s ascension into the Pre-Raphaelite world.

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May 21st, 3:00 PM

Visual Arts Panel: Artistic Narratives

Brianna Weissel Revisiting Memories

During Winter Term while taking Photography 1 and living at home, I was inspired by old photos and my surroundings. I knew I wanted to combine the past with the present as a photo project. I started with family photos taken in 2001 (with two extras from 1970 and 1991) and worked my way through old family photo albums. I lined these past photos up in the exact spot where they had been taken, only now with their current day backgrounds.

We often forget that the places where we spend our everyday lives hold many core family memories. From birthday celebrations, to holidays, to learning to ride a bike, to just everyday moments, we live life surrounded by these memories, passing them by every day, usually without noticing. It is important to cherish those moments. By revisiting these family memories, I am bringing them back to the forefront.

Dhea Kothari The Private is Political: Artistic Narratives of the Female My paintings address concepts of gender and form a critical view of the surrounding social, political and cultural issues. My recent work revolves around the day-to-day life of South Asian women and explores the heavy burden of being a woman in a patriarchal world. My work consists of miniature narratives and still life paintings that aim to capture domestic scenes in South Asia. I record the thoughts and beliefs of the people of a less progressive India and try to create parallels for a more modern India tomorrow. I collect references from the Indian miniature style of painting and vintage photographs of my family. I mostly work with oil paints and frequently incorporate layered patterns. My oil paintings honor the history of Indian miniature painting, while telling the story of my generation through political examinations of contemporary Indian society. I also work with watercolor to depict an array of female emotive powers, divinely embodied, and in the medium of printmaking to bring unrepresented goddesses to life.

Mitchell Famulare

William J. Stillman's Album 8: An Artifact of Victorian Pre-Raphaelite Encounters

Among the photographic albums of the William James Stillman Collection at Union College is Album 8, a small cloth bound album with a leather cover. An alumnus of 1848, Stillman is known for his international career as a journalist, photographer, and diplomat. From traveling from New York to London to Greece and to a variety of other corners of the globe, Stillman came to influence the political, social, and cultural scenes of the nineteenth century. Union College holds more than four-hundred prints of Stillman’s work as well as a collection of letters detailing correspondence between archaeologists, political figures, and family members, donated primarily in the 1950s and 70s by Stillman’s family. Album 8 is unique in this collection because the subject is Stillman’s second wife and Pre-Raphaelite painter, Marie Spartali.

The album consists of seventeen images of Spartali across its thirty pages; it is partially full and well-preserved. Strikingly, ten of the seventeen prints of Album 8 are works of Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the most groundbreaking portraitists of the Victorian era; Stillman’s photographic hand is absent for the majority of this artifact. The on-going research surrounding Album 8 aims to determine its objecthood in relation to Stillman’s life, the nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelite art world in England, as well as the symbolic cultural underpinnings of its contents. The sequence of the images of Spartali appear to trace the trajectory of her life from a young woman, to a Pre-Raphaelite painter, to a mother; the album looks and feels like a tribute to her. By bringing together William J. Stillman, Marie Spartali, and Julia Margaret Cameron, Album 8 allows for questions to emerge regarding its construction, Victorian costume, Stillman’s personal life, transnational identity, as well as Spartali’s ascension into the Pre-Raphaelite world.

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