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Wearing Interiors and Exteriors: Tori Ellison’s Shell

​​The dress is a staple of clothing history. Its form is associated with femininity, adornment, beauty, and formality.  Tori Ellison has historically worked with the dress motif since the 1990s, using them thematically for self-perception and bodily identities. As seen with her other featured dress piece, Burnt Dress (1993) embodies the ideas of restoration and rebirth through charred remains. The contrasting outlines serve as a reminder of the past and room for new beginnings. 

Tori Ellison, Burnt Dress, 1993, Drawing, Charcoal, Acrylic Polymer, Ash, and Fabric on Paper, 50 x 38 in.

Ellison continues to explore this shape with Shell (2010), a wall-mounted paper dress sculpture. Shell immediately captures attention the way it “floats” on display, as if it’s worn by an invisible being. There is an indisputable mystery and allure surrounding the piece’s voice. We Live in the Sky features Ellison’s interpretation of metamorphosis through Shell’s commentary on personal growth and discovery. 

Tori Ellison, Shell, 2010, Paper, Wire, and Acrylic, app. 5.5 x 45 x 2 in.

We Live in the Sky includes works with the spoken and written word. With accompanying textual pieces like Ellison’s  Sky Writing (2024) and Windows in the Sky (2024), Shell stands out as a piece without words. However, Ellison still gives the dress a voice of its own. Immediately, viewers will notice the spaces carved out within the layered paper. The positive and negative spaces that the paper dress occupies call for a larger inquiry about the intention of this piece. Though its exterior beauty is its main element, it is also important to note the interiors. The organic shapes, layering, and curves of the dress create an invitation instead of a rejection. Ellison’s piece finds itself in a space of temporariness. Shifting localities and movement as the paper medium adapts to the surrounding air. Despite the stillness of the room, Shell stands unafraid. It commands a certain vibe that almost asks for one to keep looking. Like the shells you may find on the beach, Shell’s pearlized surface is a delicate exterior holding untold stories inside.

Shell gives its paper fabric a new form outside of its traditional 2D planes. Perhaps it serves as a literal shell for interpretation. Can we see ourselves inside the dress? Even the name Shell, implies an emptiness to be filled. In a space about displacement and identity, what can our exterior and interior selves find within Shell? Can we find a home in spaces unconventional to us? Beyond gendered clothing, Shell offers a found shield against the changing world. It provides the mind a space to grow into, a hidden place to house one’s vulnerabilities, secrets, and memories. 

Since the beginning of human history, paper has been used to account. It is not far off to assume that paper and humanity are deeply intertwined. In line with conversations surrounding transformation, it leads to a major question: how does paper align with the self? The properties of paper can be closely associated with conceptualizing consciousness since paper can be created, changed, and destroyed. Even the way paper is made, it is taken from trees, turned into ​​wood pulp, and then pressed and dried. As paper, its form is impermanent and yet fixed, having the infinite capacity to become something new. Shell embodies this, as the living and ever-cyclical nature of paper actualizes the nature of identity. The self is never stagnant, it is to be molded, written on, and hung out to dry. 

Tori Ellison, Shell, 2010, Paper, Wire, and Acrylic, app. 5.5 x 45 x 2 in.

A dress is expected to form one’s body. We expect it to highlight the best and hide the worst. However, Ellison calls to honoring the uncomfortable places not explored. In connecting body, mind, and identity, she asks us to reevaluate the ways we view ourselves in the idealist of shapes. Perhaps we can all learn to wear Ellison’s Shell, to make it a home, to remodel it, and eventually outgrow it.

Tori Ellison’s work is included in We Live in the Sky: Home, Displacement, Identity at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from October 16 to December 7, 2024. For more information on Tori Ellison, visit https://www.toriellison.com/. For more information on We Live in the Sky: Home, Displacement, Identity and related events, visit https://stamp.umd.edu/centers/stamp_gallery.

Current Exhibition

Window to Earth

We Live in the Sky: Home, Displacement, Identity from October 16 to December 7, 2024 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Oliver Foley

We Live in the Sky is an exhibition dominated by the tones of paper and black ink, with the vast majority of the works on paper using an achromatic palette. Amongst these works, Tori Ellison’s Windows in the Sky (2024) stands out as one of the exhibition’s only multicolor screenprints. Screen prints only have two discrete values of color: there are areas where the screen allows ink through and areas where the photoresist is hardened and the ink cannot pass through. In order to create the illusion of grays and color gradients, this piece employs a technique called halftone. Halftone prints transform an image into a grid of colored dots, and these dots are scaled in size based on how much of a color should be perceived. In Windows in the Sky, the paper is black, so the space left between the halftone dots of the color results in a darkening of the perceived color. The areas of intersection where the different colored screens meet appears lighter and more saturated, since more of the black background is obscured by the ink.

Tori Ellison, Windows in the Sky (2024)

This dark, yet colorful piece is hung opposite from Tori Ellison’s Sky Writing (2024). The airy, freely floating Sky Writing hangs in stark contrast to the earthy tones of Windows in the Sky. The parchment is semi-translucent like a cloud covering the sun, sparsely adorned with the shadow-like tendrils of calligraphy. One of the central sheets of Sky Writing even uses the same screen as Windows in the Sky, but in a neutral black rather than a hued ink. The bird of the earth and bird of the sky face each other in the gallery space.  The two pieces mirror each other in many ways, including literally: Windows in the Sky is enclosed in a highly reflective glass frame, which almost always reflects the lights of the space and Sky Writing. At times the dark print is overpowered by the reflections, like the reflections of sky on a lake. Standing in this space between Sky Writing and Windows in the Sky conjures up the feeling of floating amidst dense clouds and looking down onto earth through a small window. 

Tori Ellison, Sky Writing (2024)

Tori Ellison’s work is included in We Live in the Sky at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from October 16th to December 7th, 2024. For more information on Ellison, visit https://www.toriellison.com/. For more information on We Live in the Sky and related events, visit https://stamp.umd.edu/articles/stamp_gallery_presents_we_live_sky_home_displacement_identity or visit our instagram @stampgalleryumd.

Current Exhibition

Standing and Showering in Sound: What Center and Periphery Mean in Mami Takahashi’s Audio Journal

We Live in the Sky: Home, Displacement, Identity from October 16 to December 7, 2024, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Trinitee Tatum

Some cannot see the forest for the trees—drawn too close to the core, captivated by its light and promises, unable to look back. Others, existing farther away, wholly see it but are paralyzed by its force. The dominant Western, Anglo-Saxon American narrative weaves itself so insidiously into the cultural zeitgeist and media that it’s hard to identify and articulate, like a word lingering on the tip of the tongue or a dog chasing its tail. My initial introduction to this piece was an anecdote about feeling invisible and othered when prompted to retell my family’s “immigration” story in the third grade. The words evaded me as I attempted to articulate how exclusionary the assignment felt as I was asked to frame my ancestors’ enslavement in relation to immigration via Ellis Island. How, when it came to immigrating to the United States, Ellis Island was at the center, and everything else existed in the margins. Combating the tides of this pervasive dominant narrative is a daunting task, but artists like Mami Takahashi wield the power of language to center and platform the voices of immigrants. In her work Audio Journal (2024), Takahashi memorializes the unique and individualized experiences of immigration, the sensations of belonging and disbelonging, in a sonic assemblage.

Our struggles as immigrants, though individual and varying, share a winding path of fear. Some similar fears are shared regardless of the story: social fear related to the fragility of status, fear of differences in culture and accents, fear of missing out on “common knowledge,” and fear of a limited support system in the new country.

Mami Takahashi via website.
Mami Takahashi, Audio Journal, 2024.

Best described as a sound collage, Audio Journal is a harmonic layering of audio recordings from the Austin, Texas, immigrant community, a collaborative collection of 1-minute recordings at 11 AM from immigrant communities, and interviews from UMD’s international community. Activated by stepping into a marked circle on the gallery floor, a directional speaker bathes visitors from above in a blend of immigrant stories interwoven with fleeting sounds of daily life. The speaker’s design makes the sound feel as if it emanates from the listener’s own body, creating an intimate, almost internal experience that dissipates upon leaving the listening area, with sound softly spilling from the shower’s edges. Artist Takahashi’s use of a directional speaker here “investigates intimacy, though not necessarily closeness, in public spaces.” The speaker itself embodies a boundary– a threshold– separating the center from the periphery, powerfully demonstrating how voices at the center can overwhelm those on the margins.

Krystof Wodiczko, Monument for the Living, 2020.

Takahashi’s work of using language to hold space for immigrant voices parallels Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s ongoing projects of documenting the lives of immigrants, refugees, and other marginalized communities. Wodiczko’s Monument (2020) is the superimposition of the likenesses and spoken narratives of twelve resettled refugees onto the 1881 monument to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut in Madison Square Park. Reimagining the statue of this Union hero challenges the preconceived notions of which stories are preserved and honored for future generations– and which are left to fade into obscurity.

Audio Journal uses the act of standing to hold space for immigrant voices, urging visitors to make both a literal and metaphorical commitment to honor the narratives, experiences, and challenges of immigrant communities. Standing becomes an intentional, active exertion of the body—a stance that amplifies voices often overshadowed by dominant narratives. It acknowledges the physical and emotional labor involved in sharing and receiving these stories, inviting visitors to stand, listen, and shower in the sound.

Mami Takahashi’s work is included in We Live in the Sky: Home, Displacement, Identity at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from October 16 to December 7, 2024. 

For more information on Mami Takahashi, visit https://mamitakahashi.art/. 

Current Exhibition

Securi ex machina, or Safe from the machine

The Digital Landscape from August 26 to October 5, 2024, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Trinitee Tatum

For an instant, I stood in front of Chris Combs’ Pollination (2023). It simultaneously stole my face and voice, projecting a virtual me before the physical me. The real me. I should have felt violated, exposed, but I stayed. I let Pollination search and seize me. I spoke so it could hear me. I was compelled to let it document me. A moment of pirated digitalization transformed into a prolonged, authorized archival of the self for my own benefit. What led me, and many others, to indulge in and consent to Pollination’s surveillance? Are we hoping to see if technology perceives us the way we see ourselves? Or is it the hope that this piece documents our existence forever, so we may never be forgotten? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the unearthing of the algorithmic and systematic indulgence of surveillance for the sake of vanity and ego.

Chris Combs, Pollination, 2023. Aluminum, DIN terminal blocks, wire, screens, computers, 5×4.5×4’. Screenshot via artist’s website.

Pollination is an interactive flower-shaped piece that responds to faces and speech. It uses a camera to recognize faces, transforming them into rotating flower-like shapes, while a microphone listens to speech and displays its transcription on multiple small screens. However, Pollination does not fulfill the desire to be forever etched into the ether as nothing is uploaded from the piece. It uses “whisper.cpp” to transcribe audio entirely within the device and the facial recognition is powered by OpenCV. The closed circuited experience of Pollination means the user’s interaction is disposable, ephemeral. It’s a denial of permanent documentation.

Search results of security camera selfies on Pinterest.

On both systemic and individualistic levels, surveillance is often driven by concerns of fear, vulnerability, and a struggle for control. Surveillance pacifies through the external imposition of order, creating an illusion of security and stability through acts of monitoring, predicting, and understanding. However, this sense of authority is often superficial, and surveillance’s inherently parasitic nature demands data for eternity. Only major organizations have been able to harness the beast by overtly passing the labor of watching on to the users. Big tech companies create opportunities for self-surveillance and external monitoring via social media, but rather than creating a sense of control, this often exacerbates feelings of inadequacy and insecurities. Intentionally or unintentionally, users equate their self-worth to their social media metrics and are driven to curate a perfect public image to feel both internal and external validation. The more susceptible users watch themselves and others via digital networks, the more the images and algorithms reinforce their insecurities, where they compare and conflate themselves with the idealized, curated lives on their feeds. This creates a feedback loop where insecurity fuels surveillance, and surveillance fuels further insecurity.

Screenshot of ChatGPT when prompted to consider its own participation in self surveillance.

Ultimately, (self)-surveillance driven by insecurity is an endless and futile pursuit of reassurance as it only temporarily assuages fears– big, existential fears of the unknown, the fear of losing control, the fear of mortality, the fear of fate. The fear that we are here, and then we are gone. This reassurance, however, is fleeting, a temporary respite. The more one surveils, the more one realizes that complete control or total knowledge is impossible. Look Pollination in the eye, speak to its mic, but seek personal satisfaction beyond the screens. 

Chris Combs’ work is included in The Digital Landscape at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from August 26 to October 5, 2024. 

Current Exhibition

Authenticity, AI, and the New East in Varvara Tokareva’s ‘Utopia’

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Palinopsia from April 23rd to May 17th, 2024, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by James Cho

What is a utopia? Can one act as a facade to hide a dystopia? In Varvara Tokareva’s three Utopia pieces, she questions these same sentiments about the state of the USSR during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Alongside this inquiry, Tokareva also questions the authenticity of AI as a generative art form. Together, her work has viewers inquire about how we remember the nature of the USSR and how we currently perceive AI. 

 

Varvara Tokareva, Utopia II (Screen Print), 2024.

Per the historical record, it is possible to answer both of these subjects. Whether in the form of digital prints, screen prints, or videos generated using AI and archival sources, Tokareva’s Utopia pieces reflect how the Soviet Union wanted to portray itself as a strong, perfect, and militaristic state. In essence, a perfect utopia. However, when thinking more deeply about the time period, it’s possible to discern how Tokareva reveals the true dystopia of the USSR. In her prints and videos, dozens of gymnasts choreograph themselves into perfect pyramids or parade around an open field at the Summer Olympics in 1980. Behind these literal performances hides the horror of not just the dozens of proxy wars that the USSR and United States conducted during the Cold War, but also the government’s treatment of people within the Soviet Union. The unity that Tokareva showcases in her works as a recreation of the Soviet aesthetic contrasts sharply with the USSR’s abuse and manipulation of countries in the Eastern Bloc or “Comecon.”: a system that first appeared under Stalin’s “Cominform” and then under the Warsaw Pact, notwithstanding the military crackdown in East Germany through the Berlin Wall as part of the larger “Iron Curtain” that separated Western and Eastern Europe. 

Varvara Tokareva, Utopia I (Digital Prints), 2024.

The focus of Utopia, the Olympic Games in Soviet Moscow that took place in July 1980, is a marvellous example of the USSR’s desire to hide this dystopia. At this time, the USSR had been facing allegations of its athletes using testosterone to improve their performance in previous Games. On top of this, due to the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan months earlier, the United States and multiple other countries boycotted the Summer Olympics in 1980 and a large number of European countries that attended competed under the flag of the Olympic Games rather than their native flags. Thus, despite the Soviet perfectionism displayed in the generative models that Tokareva used to create Utopia I-III, the Olympics that year were full of strife and global disunity.

This absurdity and dystopia that would not come to an end until the election of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 and his democratic reforms carry similar sentiments to our treatment of AI-generated art today. In the same way that we remember the USSR as full of conflict and superficiality, the general consensus surrounding generative art is the same. Art made by AI is commonly seen as hollow and quite literally artificial. In using this form of art to depict the Soviet Union, Tokareva brilliantly marries the art form and subject together to represent common views and memories of the Union and AI-generated art. 

Varvara Tokareva, Utopia III (Three-channel video on three monitors), 2023-2024.

As a medium, the AI-generated prints even function in the same way as the USSR does. From afar, the works look normal, but when getting a closer look viewers can see missing faces, extra body parts, and other minor imperfections created by the AI. With the USSR, the performances at the Olympic Games and propaganda spread about the success of the Communist party and Soviet Union during the Cold War hid how people in the Eastern Bloc and Russia were impoverished and struggling to eke out a living. 
Altogether, Utopia is a perfect example of the exhibition’s title, Palinopsia, which are visual symptoms in which there is an abnormal persistence or recurrence of an image in time. Though the USSR is gone today, the image of a utopia in Russia still persists. The ongoing war in Ukraine is a reminder of the persistence and recurrence of a dystopia being hidden behind puppet governments.

 

Artist Interviews, Current Exhibition

Keeping Score: The Auto-Archive of Trevon Jakaar Coleman

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Palinopsia from April 23, to May 17, 2024, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Trinitee Tatum

Viewers must be active participants to uncover the exploration of my own identity, representation, and perceptions within established spaces and genre.

Trevor Jakaar Coleman via website

If the projections flicker and no one is around to see, will they still be in our memories? Do they hold the same weight when no one watches as when we sit and stare? Perhaps Trevon Jakaar Coleman’s series of experimental projections onto quilts, walls, and windows freeze when unviewed, awaiting the audience’s wandering eyes. In witnessing the work, the viewer is challenged to be an active participant, critically thinking about the art’s layered meaning, à la Marshall McLuhan’s notion of cool media. Cool media, as McLuhan writes, is media that requires a high degree of participation on the part of the audience, juxtaposing hot media’s low audience participation. For example, McLuhan writes that lectures are hot media compared to seminars. However, the labeling of hot and cool is relative to other media, and therefore fluid in nature. Coleman, sensitive to mainstream production of hot media that captivates the viewer with illusions and artifice, seeks to defamiliarize typical audience engagement. Coleman interrogates expectations and assumptions of Black self-fashioning by unveiling his repository and fashioning his own world, treating the multitudes of his personhood as an archive to be referenced within the work.

I am going back into my own archive with the things I have held onto since… forever.

Trevor Jakaar Coleman via interview

Trevon Jakaar Coleman, Untitled (Multimedia projection installation), 2024.

Coleman reimagines previous photographs and films, mapping metaphorical projections of himself across the gallery– his community, his travels, his imaginings. Rocks and minerals are superimposed onto portraits of his community of Black creatives in Iowa City and are used to frame nostalgic videos of vast and varied landscapes. Referencing Kathryn Yusoff’s “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None,” Coleman’s work analyzes the ecological impacts of extracting rocks and minerals and the use of Black bodies as tools to extract said materials. Coleman, who describes his work as a “thought process through material,” incorporates the exploration of new techniques and practices into his work through the presentation of art made from newly acquired skills like quiltmaking in Untitled Quilt #2 (2024) and Untitled (2024). Unafraid to showcase work that might be read as “broken” or “unfinished,” he embraces imperfection and encourages viewers to do the same, confronting the production of hot media that people are quick to consume, yet not digest. Simultaneously, Coleman protests the politics of respectability, asserting that art that resists normative expectations and the status quo should not be suppressed. 

Trevon Jakaar Coleman, Untitled Quilt #2 (Multimedia), 2024.

Untitled Quilt #2 (2024) is fashioned out of acquired materials like discarded mat boards from fellow caricaturists from his time as a caricaturist in South Carolina. He scanned photographs and comics, printed them onto fabrics, and sewed them together to make a quilt. Quiltmaking’s historical position in the African American community is archival at its most potent – deeply charged with collective memory, community building, and resistance work. All of these aspects of Coleman’s work solidifies archives as a repeated motif, both through the subject matter and material. 

Of Greek origin, palin for “again,” and opsia for “seeing,” Palinopsia, in this reading, is the remembering and recreating of memories until infinity. It’s the superimposition of conscious states, the public projection of what privately lies beneath. Coleman’s art materializes the shifting of memories, the bits of self that rise to the surface again and again, waiting for the viewer to reach out and touch. 

Trevon Jakaar Coleman’s work is included in Palinopsia at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from  April 23, to May 17, 2024.

For more information on Trevon Jakaar Coleman, visit http://www.trevonjakaar.com/.

 

Current Exhibition

What it Means to Linger

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I Resist This from March 4 to April 6, 2024 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Reshma Jasmin

The first time I visited Stamp Gallery’s I Resist This was on its fourth day open. The current exhibition takes the form of an artist residency, which means that the artist, Charlotte Richardson-Deppe, would be working on the pieces for the exhibition in the gallery itself throughout the course of the program. I had met Richardson-Deppe prior to this exhibition, but I didn’t know her in the context of her work as an artist. I also had never encountered a behind-the-scenes look into the artistic process serving as an artform itself. As such, I was looking forward to talking to her about the inspiration behind her choice to perform her process and watching her in action. But on my first day in the gallery, I was alone. A bit later, someone came in, and commiserated with me about not seeing Richardson-Deppe. But she noted that she saw traces of Richardson-Deppe’s presence over the course of hours or days— in Crocs which had been moved and through progress on a textile piece that was splayed out on benches.

When I came in the next day, I did see Richardson-Deppe, and I was able to chat with her and watch her work for hours. I learned about the function of her two sewing machines; one that was well equipped for heavier fabrics (machine on the left) and the other that was meant only for hemming (machine on the right). She told me about her thrift-store strategy of buying a large quantity of cheap clothes and how she mostly collected sweaters, pull-overs, sweatpants, and leggings by chance, but that such heavier materials held up longer for her wearable creations.

Stamp Gallery on March 15, 2024

I Resist This is an exploration of interdependence versus independence, and, in many ways, serves as social commentary about the futile desire for complete independence and the simultaneously undeniable need for social support. To one of the many UMD art courses that visited the gallery, Richardson-Deppe described how she wanted to make visible the invisible relationships and networks and explore different social dynamics. e also mentioned that her wearable pieces did eventually rip during performance, but that it was an expected and welcome end. She informed me that she also teaches in the art department, and I came in during the exact hours she taught a class the day before. I was relieved that I’d be able to see Richardson-Deppe once a week, so the disappointment of the day before dissipated. But the movement of her Crocs lingered in my mind. Why was the sign of previous presence more melancholic than absence alone?

Whenever I was in the gallery sans Richardson-Deppe, I’d look for her Crocs, and sure enough, they’d be in a different location than when I last saw them (See if you can spot them in the photos below!). It was comforting to know she had been there, but she also felt just out of reach. Would I see her again? Absolutely, and it would often be the very next day, and I knew that. And yet, each time I didn’t see her, I felt as though we were two ships passing in the night. 

Stamp Gallery on March 15, 2024 Stamp Gallery on March 15, 2024

Stamp Gallery on April 05, 2024

My expectations all came from the descriptor: Artist-In-Residence. “___-in-residence” is most commonly used for professors, artists, poets, etc. This use comes from the definition of “resident” from the 14th century Medieval Latin word residentem and/or residens, which refers to one who dwells in one location to fulfill their duty in a Christian mission/obligation sense. The phrase “___-in-residence” and the expanded context of the definition only began showing up in the 19th century. 

Related to resident is residence, or in Medieval Latin, residentia, which means is one’s dwelling place or the act of dwelling in a place. These words are derivatives of residere, which is Medieval Latin for reside. The broken down meaning is “re-”: back, again and “sidere”/“sed”: to sit. Together, residere means “sit down, settle; remain behind, rest, linger; be left.”

Richardson-Deppe’s pieces rest, remain, and are left behind while she’s not in the gallery. But Richardson-Deppe also lingers and settles in the gallery during the moments she herself is absent from the space. The growing piles of soft sculpture, the textile pieces approaching completion, the ever-changing composition of the items resting on her worktable, and of course, the silently moving Crocs all continue her performance of creation. The fact that all such changes occurred are signs of life, signs of Richardson-Deppe.

I Resist This is an exploration of interdependence versus independence, and, in many ways, serves as social commentary about the futile desire for complete independence and the simultaneously undeniable need for social support. To one of the many UMD art courses that visited the gallery, Richardson-Deppe described how she wanted to make visible the invisible relationships and networks and explore different social dynamics. 

Charlotte Richardson-Deppe, Red (2023), Screenshot from video. Performers: Gwyneth Blair, Lisa Dang, Sarah Gnolek, Amanda Murphy, Charlotte Richardson-Deppe, Kat Ritzman, Jill Stauffer, Allie Wallace, Jackie Wang.

The relationship between an artist and their labor is typically invisible; most exhibitions only display completed artwork, and even if an artist is present at times to discuss their process and inspiration, we don’t get to see them at work. Through her residency, when Richardson-Deppe is in the gallery, her hands on the textiles and sewing machine are seen; as the maker she is part of her work. However, even residents of homes leave to fulfill their other responsibilities and live out other parts of their lives. One part of being a “resident”  involves leaving and returning, being absent and present. In the moments when Richardson-Deppe is not in the gallery, the connection to her work that was once visible disappears. Yet, though we do not see her, we still unconsciously perceive her presence in the changes to her work and workspace. What is invisible is still there, even if it only exists in the abstract understanding that change occurred and someone was responsible for it. Like Richardson-Deppe suggests through her work, even invisible relationships are inarguably present.

Stamp Gallery on March 15, 2024

Stamp Gallery on April 05, 2024

Humans look for signs of life everywhere. In space, we search for biomarkers, water/ice, radio waves, pollution. In biology, we look for order, sensitivity or response to the environment, reproduction, growth and development, regulation, homeostasis, and energy processing. In my homes, I look for whose shoes are present and which ones; I notice what food in the fridge is slowly decreasing and whether things have been shuffled around; what the arrangement of dishes in the dishwasher looks like; what doors are open; whether there are lights turned on and which ones. I look not only for signs that someone was home or not, but also for signs of who specifically is, and what they might be up to, how they feel.

Even when their presence is dubious, we look for people. Regardless of how lonesome we feel, when we search for people, and even when they aren’t around, we find them. Sometimes, we’re not even looking for them but we feel them throughout their absence nonetheless. Even when Richardson-Deppe isn’t in the gallery, she lingers.

Our presence in each others’ lives is irrefutable and irrevocable. People come and go, but there are always the traces they leave behind. And as melancholy as it is to feel each other linger, there’s a comfort in knowing that people are always around us, that they always stay with us.

Charlotte Richardson-Deppe’s work is included in I Resist This at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from March 4th to April 6th, 2024. Richardson-Deppe will end her artist residency with the performance I Resist This on April 6th, 2024 at 7pm.

Artist Interviews, Current Exhibition, Explore, Uncategorized

Peace in Practice

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Placeholder from October 10, to December 9, 2023, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Trinitee Tatum

“There is enough multitudes in all of us.”

(Richard Hart, 2023)

In our digital age, words like “software” and “hardware” have clear-cut meanings. However, when these words are superimposed and incorporated into the conversation on the relationship between nature and technology, the essence of these “wares” deepens. Preconceptions of the meanings of software and hardware are challenged through their convergence in Richard Hart’s series of “Water Drawings.” In this series, real rocks are placed alongside projections of patterns that emerge and disappear on the rock’s surface. By juxtaposing the “software” of animation to the “hardware” of rock as durable and utilitarian material, Hart exposes time as a third “ware.” The interconnectedness of software, hardware, and “timeware” parallels the dimensionality of humanity through the mind, body, and soul.

Richard Hart, Water drawing (slate and stone), 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

The South African artist’s works traverse both the digital and physical realms, exploring modernity’s spectral quality. Although he contends with weighty subjects, Hart taps into his easy going personality and creative ethos as he grapples with the Duality of nature technology and the materiality of time. His work exudes a playful quality as patterns dance across the crevices of rocks, conversing with the materials and the artist. Technology has had a profound impact on the natural world in many ways. On one hand, technological advancements have led to renewable energy and sustainable agriculture. On the other hand, the rapid development of technology has led to pollution, deforestation, and climate change. Time will tell what the final outcome of this relationship will be.

“The best work dances around things, points at things very slyly.”

(Richard Hart, 2023)

Hart is ready to face the challenge of dealing with such daunting realities in his artwork, despite there being no satisfying answers. However, Hart’s creative process relies heavily on experimentation and problem-solving skills. Creating this artwork is a demanding task; setting up alone may take hours, and the drawings themselves must be done in one sitting. Despite the intense time constraints, the process is meditative, and Hart can easily get lost in the work. The “Water Drawings” offer a respite in a chaotic world.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CkCjBi9Abvs/?igshid=MTRoang3N2x1ZTM2dg%3D%3D
Richard Hart, Water drawing (2022). Video courtesy of the artist.

The concept of placehood is crucial in location-based art like this series. Many of the larger rocks require on-site work, either in nature or on the sides of buildings. Even the “Water Drawings” done in the studio are influenced by place. The artist’s work is greatly influenced by his home country, South Africa, but his move to New York has introduced another sense of place and initiated a conversation about one’s place in the world. While transitioning from Africa to America, Hart had to adapt to a new culture and environment different from his own. He also had to consider that his audience may view his work differently than he does.

“Place is the whole thing. It is where the whole thing is situated.”

(Richard Hart, 2023)

Reflecting on one’s sense of placehood has never seemed more important or relevant than when facing the complex and interconnected issues that challenge our current state of global affairs. In the face of crisis, the value of preserving and cultivating the unique identity and cultural significance of a place is imperative. In safeguarding our local identities, cultures, and environments, we create a more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable world.

Richard Hart’s work is included in Placeholder at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from October 10 to December 9, 2023. 

  • For more information on Richard Hart, visit https://www.instagram.com/richardhartstudio/.
Contemporary Art Purchasing Program (CAPP), Current Exhibition, Explore, Uncategorized

The clock strikes Infertile:  Gabriela Vainsencher’s Hourglass

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What We Do After from August 28 to September 30, 2023 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Reshma Jasmin

*Note: this post refers to womanhood and motherhood in a cis-normative manner due to the organ-centric focus of aging*

In the past three months, my father has brought up the topic of marriage, babies, and my biological clock three times—I am a 21-year-old college student. He likened my ova as the fruits of a mango tree: after it reaches its fruit bearing age, the best mangoes are those produced in the first three years. Ironically, I have endometriosis, so the question of fertility is up in the air.

Gabriela Vainsencher’s Hourglass emanates this anxiety, by creating the anatomy of a cervix in the shape of an hourglass, with menstrual blood slipping through the cervix like sand. But Vainsencher’s experience differs from mine, which makes sense as she is 20 years older, an established artist, and a mother. She is also a cis-woman who went through pregnancy and labor for her own biological daughter, and she depicts womanhood and motherhood within the realm of her personal experience. So the impending midnight strike of a biological clock means something entirely different for her than it does for me. 

Gabriela Vainsencher, Mom, 2021. Porcelain. 8 x 12 feet

Most of Vainsencher’s recent work focuses on the experiences of motherhood, notably Mom (2021) (pictured above). She describes the piece as “…a self-portrait inspired by living through the covid-19 pandemic, which started when my daughter was one year old. For over a year I cared for her, worked from home, and couldn’t get to my studio” (sourced from artist’s website). The large porcelain piece depicts a snake-like figure of arms and breasts doing various motherly tasks. The breasts are arguably what makes the biggest impact. Their literal function is to provide milk, and whether mothers use formula or breastmilk, the symbolism still stands: motherhood is allowing your nutrients to be sucked out of you, or in more palatable terms, giving up yourself for your child. While all the arms are occupied with various motherly tasks like cooking, shopping, cleaning, carrying a child, etc., there are just as many  breasts as there are arms, even though breasts only serve one main function in motherhood. Although there is also the long haired head at one end of the figure and the title to distinguish that the figure is a woman, a mother, the abundance of breasts hint at what else society demands of mothers: women who maintain their role as pretty sexual objects.

Mother Figure Series Sculptures (2021-ongoing) Porcelain, stoneware, underglaze, etc.

Vainsencher’s Mother Figure Series Sculptures (pictured above) depicts worried mothers, pregnant bellies, female anatomy, and the looming biological clock. The stretched, protruding bellies and the folds of skin on the backs of each torso show the toll of pregnancy on the body. The sagging breast depicts the loss of conventional beauty and youth that comes with age and motherhood. The key-chain earrings on oversized ears suggests that mothers are always in motion, always thinking about their children’s needs and schedules.

Gabriela Vainsencher, Hourglass, 2023. Porcelain, underglaze, glaze, acrylic

Upon seeing Gabriella Vainsencher’s Hourglass (pictured above), my first thought was, “How is this mounted on the wall?” Granted, I was watching the early stages of its installation in the Stamp Gallery, and the piece is made of porcelain and glaze, so it seemed a bit delicate to be held up the way that it is (on two screws drilled through the porcelain). In my surprise at how securely the piece was mounted, I realized that my assumption about the fragility and “weakness” of the porcelain was similar to the societal perception of women as the “weaker sex.” But the curved lines of the stretchy maternity pants on the conflated pregnant bellies from Vainsencher’s Mother Figure Series Sculptures and the bulges with the same curved lines tell a different story: they resemble striated muscles, signifying the strength written into a mother’s body.

The muscle-like bulges also create the hourglass shape, and lead the eye to the center of the piece, the cervix. The transition from the warm, cozy golden brown of the uterus to the dark dried period blood of the vaginal canal resembles the passage of time and a movement from comfort to discomfort. This gradient coupled with the rock-like shapes in the two halves of the hourglass shape depict the pain of aging; each period brings one closer to menopause, and the hourglass figure of a conventionally beautiful woman is also lost with time. Simply put, in our culture, old women are not pretty. The biological clock is a term coined by men to describe how a woman’s fertility is headed towards the precarious cliff of the age of 30 and later at menopause, but it also describes the anxieties of women where their worth and standing in society hangs in the balance of their beauty and fertility. 

The rock-like forms passing through the hourglass resonate with me, as periods and ovulation involve immense pain due to endometriosis. And, despite not being a mother, nor subscribing entirely to the identity of woman, nor intending to experience pregnancy and have a biological child; the fear of losing fertility and youth translating to the loss of beauty and worth is an anxiety I share in my own experience. With Hourglass, Vainsencher depicts the universal fear of aging, unique to those who identify as women and have female sex organs, as being built into our bodies as a ticking biological clock, a constant reminder of our fears and strength and worth. 

Gabriela Vainsencher’s work is included in What We Do After at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from August 28 to September 30, 2023. 

For more information on Gabriela Vainsencher visit https://gabrielavainsencher.com/

For more information on What We Do After, and related events, visit https://stamp.umd.edu/centers/stamp_gallery

For more information about the Contemporary Art Purchasing Program (CAPP) visit: https://stamp.umd.edu/centers/stamp_gallery/contemporary_art_collection

Current Exhibition

Process and Bureaucracy

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What We Do After from August 28 to September 30, 2023 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Oliver Foley

Jenny Wu, Magically Found $768,000,000,000, 2022

At first glance, the two-dimensional, wall-mounted, and rectangular form of Jenny Wu’s Magically Found $768,000,000,000 might read as a traditional painting. Yet, upon closer inspection, the viewer will notice the puzzle-like assembly of resinous blocks which comprise the piece. Wu creates these blocks by repeating a process of pouring thick layers of latex paint on glass, letting it dry, and pouring another layer. She cuts cross-sections of the dried paint into mineral-like tiles, which she then assembles into a “sculptural painting,” as Wu calls it. In many traditional paintings, the techniques and processes taken to create the work are hard to discern. In contrast, Wu’s sculptural painting prominently displays the layering process as one of the central aspects of the piece. 

In combination with the piece’s visible craftsmanship, the title itself contributes a great amount of thematic meaning to the artwork. The title quotes a tweet by Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib which states “Magically found $768,000,000,000 for a defense budget, but the same folks can’t fully fund the $45- $60 billion needed to remove lead service lines in our country.” The bureaucracy of the US government, which overwhelmingly prioritizes national defense over national need, never fails to “magically” find the resources it needs to remain militarily dominant. This piece of process art, which is transparent in method, stands in stark contrast to the opaque nature of the government’s activity.

Wu’s latex agate peels away the near-infinite layers of power dynamics, lobbying, and hidden motivations which go into the government’s budgeting. By encouraging the viewer to ponder the parallels between art and governance, Magically Found $768,000,000,000 encourages transformative thought about what lies beneath the surface of our nation’s institutions. Perhaps through extraction, convolution, and rearrangement, even our government could become as transparent and beautiful as Wu’s sculptural paintings. 

Jenny Wu’s work is included in What We Do After at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from August 28 to September 30, 2023.