Visual Connections
Jagiellonian University
Craftowne: Comics and Art Installation / Art and Critique View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Billy Simms
This study explores two gallery exhibitions, Craftowne: a visual novel and Craftowne: the 7th hole. These two an interactive gallery installation pieces combine text and various media to tell the narrative of a planned suburban community outside of Washington, DC during the ‘70s and ‘80s. The overarching narratives of both of these installation graphic novels is a critique and examination of American suburban life and culture. The goal of these installations is to utilize the art gallery space to create a graphic novel that is presented as installation art. The hamlet of Craftowne is symbolic of America as a whole and is based on the actual town in Maryland in which I grew up and the impact that the town has had on me as a person and artist. Many of the pieces in the Craftowne installation are interactive and require the viewer to actively engage with them. Craftowne: a visuals novel was exhibited in 2017 at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH and Miami University, Oxford OH. It was also exhibited in 2018 at Joe's Movement Emporium in Mount Ranier, MD. Craftowne: the 7th hole was exhibited in 2021 at The Pyramid Sculpture Park and Museum in Hamilton, OH.
The Haunting Presence of the Marais Statue on the Rooiplein (Red Square) at Stellenbosch University View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elmarie Costandius, Gera de Villiers, Leslie Van Rooi
Stellenbosch University (SU) would not have been established in 1918 without the financial contribution support of Jan Marais (born 1850), who made his fortune in diamond explorations in the Northern Cape, South Africa. A statue was erected of Marais in 1950 on the Jan Marais Square, also called the Rooiplein (Red Square), the central gathering place at SU campus. The current Visual Redress project on the SU campus aims to redress spaces and remove hurtful symbols such as plagues and statues, but also to contextualise those symbols that remain on campus. The Marais statue has been on the list to be contextualised for four years, but because of its sensitive nature, this process has not been completed. The history of Jan Marais as the benefactor of SU on the one hand and on the other hand Marais’s diamond explorations that were done on land that was taken from indigenous peoples, employing cheap labour for his enrichment, make this a complex undertaking. Therefore, the statue’s past keeps haunting the present. In this research, we draw on Derrida’s concept of hauntology, where things that seem to be dead, such as statues, continuously haunt the present. We created a cartography of the statue and its surroundings by exploring the material qualities and historical and current written documents and interviewed people who were directly affected by this history. By drawing up a cartography and understanding the complexities from different perspectives we hope to take this project further.
Photography Exhibitions in Wales - a Multi-Layered Production of Identities : A Sociological Study View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eve Ruet
This paper from my current PhD in Sociology explores how through photography exhibitions in Wales displaying photographs showing the people of Wales, photographers, and curators contribute to creating and presenting multiple scales of Welsh identities. For the purpose of this paper, we look at two elements: the use of the notion of ‘communities’ and ‘stereotypes’ in the production of identities in photography exhibitions in Wales and how these notions are articulated by institutions and photographers. To conduct this research, three scales of understanding are studied, the artistic stance of the photographers, the organizational one of the curators and the communicational one of the institutions. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with photographers and curators. To complete this, the available synopses of the exhibitions were studied with a discourse analysis to uncover the way ‘Wales’ is defined in the discourses around the exhibitions. The study shows that photographers, through their art, construct their own sense of self, in relation to a particular community at a certain place and time. The curation process aims at a larger scale and ‘encode’ the photographs under a broader subject often around the nation, and the communities. The communication process displayed in the synopses reveals the discourse created around these exhibitions as projects that seem to aim at defining ‘Wales’ and its ‘communities’, and at challenging ‘stereotypical’ identities of Wales.
Video as Mediation of Performance: The Work of Ulrike Rosenbach View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathleen Wentrack
The German artist Ulrike Rosenbach has been a groundbreaking figure in new media since the early 1970s as evidenced in the new retrospective at the Zentrum für Kunst en Medien Karlsruhe held to coincide with her 80th birthday. As an early experimenter with new media, the artist developed “video live performance” in which she concurrently videotaped the work that the audience would experience as a performance, but also from a different angle on a monitor. This live, “closed circuit” with which she was the first to experiment, often included a layering of imagery as in "Glauben Sie nicht, daß ich eine Amazone bin," 1975. The works would exist as a live performance, a performance with a video component, and later developed into video work. These subsequent projects could be developed into a video or into “media sculpture” such as "Die Einsame Spaziergängerin," 1979/2009. Some media sculpture would be included in later performances after which a new video would be created such as "Orphelia" 1984/1987/1988. Rosenbach’s manipulation of multiple forms of media in dialogue with the diverse range of themes challenges understandings of culture that is indicative of a post-1960s moment. Her work is examined as a model of an artist’s cultural production that evades the stability of the traditional artwork and challenges a continuity of meaning.
