The Digital Landscape from August 26 to October 5, 2024 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Olivia DiJulio
As a woman with disabilities, my work is often multisensory and immersive, as I feel it is important to provide multiple ways for people to experience the artwork.
Michelle Lisa Herman
Every day, we navigate the architecture that surrounds us, interacting with buildings, walkways, and streets that were designed and approved by planners and stakeholders. But who truly defines the physical and social purposes of our spaces? Whose needs and experiences are prioritized in the creation of our environments? The Digital Landscape features three of Michelle Lisa Herman’s multimedia works that deconstruct the history of stigmatizing narratives surrounding disability, and to give viewers the agency to reimagine the body as it is in space.
What inspires and drives the design of architecture? This pressing question is central to Herman’s exploration of physical and social spaces. Self-identifying as a woman with disabilities, Herman critiques the hegemony that buildings and institutions of power support. Untitled (To Bear the Weight) #2 (2022) is a small video installation that projects Herman’s moving body on a paper model of Bremen’s town hall. Viewers can circle the entire model, allowing for an interpersonal viewing experience. Herman’s inspiration for this piece was found after observing 16th-century architecture during her exchange program in Bremen, Germany.
Michelle Lisa Herman, Untitled (To Bear the Weight) #2, 2022. Video installation. Video courtesy of the Artist.
The medium of the video projection connects the themes of communication, societal norms, and technology of The Digital Landscape. Acting as the pillars, columns, and arcways, Herman uses her body to make an unconventional impression. The most notable part of the piece is the reference to Leonardo DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. The iconography of the Vitruvian Man portrayed by Herman’s body emphasizes the dominant, Eurocentric nature of architectural design. Incorporating her body into the building forms a powerful message of resistance against the idealized calculations of the “white, able male body”, as described by Herman. In realizing this connection, Herman challenges the viewer to rethink how power and design are interconnected. Beyond the physical spaces that surround us, the unnoticed, invisible roots of power fuel systems of oppression through collective ignorance.
Untitled (Construction) #2 (2024) and Untitled (Construction) #8 (2024) are from the same collection of works using casts of Herman’s limbs to build structural forms. This series combines the delicate positions of her arms and hands in tandem with other objects to create a surreal composition. The visual contrast of the organic and rigid forms among the colorful lighting conveys an archaic feel reminiscent of historically European, marble buildings.
Michelle Lisa Herman, Untitled (Construction) #2 and #8, 2024. Giclee on fabric mounted to aluminum. Images courtesy of the Artist.
Herman’s pieces demonstrate the importance of activist art and critical messaging through media. Instead of encouraging stereotypical narratives, Herman reclaims what is stolen from artists with disabilities. Reminiscent of the “Supercrip” label, disability should not be an inspirational model for non-disabled people. Agency to those working against instilled norms of disability, Herman’s work reflects upon independence from oppressive institutions. She reminds us of the reality that many marginalized identities face daily about their bodies. The fetishization of disability thrives from portraying it as a superpower, obscuring the very real experiences behind it.
The ways we navigate the world are defined by the bodies we were born with and the boundaries set by society. However, Michelle Lisa Herman is one of many voices that address the importance of inclusive design and solidarity for marginalized groups. While it can be easy to assume that our reality is fully optimized, broadening our senses and perspectives is essential for embracing the experiences of others. In presenting The Digital Landscape, both To Bear the Weight and Construction subjugate the social constructions that define our public and private spaces.
Michelle Lisa Herman’s 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. For more information on Michelle Lisa Herman, visit https://www.michellelisaherman.com/. For more information on The Digital Landscape and related events, visit https://stamp.umd.edu/centers/stamp_gallery.
Teach Me How to Love This World from October 19 to December 10, 2022 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Isabella Chilcoat
My typical approach to articulating each exhibition by the Stamp Gallery over the past year and a half has involved a level of formal artistic analysis and critique. However Teach Me How to Love This World: Kei Ito plucked a chord in my being that I feel calls for a more intimate reading. Ito’s current solo exhibition manifests not only a physical presence, but also a profound psychological phenomenon of deep empathy and contemplation. His works plunge my own mind into an abyss of chilling curiosity – they cast a red-hued light of extrospection on my own inner tribulations. Themes of generational trauma, visible and invisible wounds, violence, destruction, rebirth, and peace radiate from the six works on view, and each piece contains a piercing capacity to connect its viewer with a larger history surrounding them. Ito’s work certainly has prompted me to deepen my inward self-exploration as it connects to generational wounds that bleed into my present.
Aptly titled, Into the Abyss (2022), a unique C-Print of sunlight developed film, hangs on the Gallery’s entrance wall, a rectangular plate of aluminum dibond emblazoned with blood-red word pairings against its smooth black surface. The text couples a pronoun and a noun, pronoun + noun, pronoun + noun, pronoun + noun… endlessly in columns that eventually obscure toward the bottom. These groupings compose a solemn poetry to ponder while sojourning through and beyond the gallery walls with phrases pertaining to: “their + war,” “his + war,” “his + weapons,” “your + weapons,” “your + peace.” With a repetition that references an obsessive compulsive sequence of words, Into the Abyss forces me to recall my own journey through healing the consequences of generational trauma.
Kei Ito, Into the Abyss, 2022. Unique C-Print film mounted on aluminum dibond, laminate, 40x32x1 in.
Though different circumstances, Ito’s encapsulation of heirloom agony, or legacies of passed down emotional damages, is something that resonates in a myriad of settings yet lacks the recognition and understanding it deserves. I particularly love this print because it echoes a period in my early childhood where I would repeat a list of the same, completely arbitrary “safe” phrases in instances of high anxiety in a set numerical quantity. As a child the specific recitation of my “safe” words calmed my autonomic nervous system as an act of defense in a situation in which I felt my safety or autonomy was compromised. In retrospect of more than fifteen years (and with professionally guided coping strategies) I can still remember my “safe” phrases – no longer with a feeling of desperate relief, but a feeling of grief for a waning childhood of which I had little concept at the time and a stronger desire to console my child self and restore a sense of security. Ito’s phrases, while clearly intentionally correlated, illustrate the sequences of inner thoughts in an ordered but increasingly blurry image synonymous with memory. Memories of my “safe” words, survival mechanisms, and certain traumatic instances of my life flicker through my mind like an orderly reel of film or text until the clarity vanishes in a manner similar to the visual qualities of Into the Abyss and other works in the Stamp Gallery, including a dual Kodak slide projection piece titled Teach Me How to Love This World (2022), in which the same pronoun + noun couples project on the wall.
Kei Ito, Teach Me How to Love This World, 2022. 35mm slide, Kodak carousel projectors.
Ito’s exhibition has offered a narrative and a solidarity to trauma by employing the acute dichotomy between war and peace. His work in the gallery also translates the severity of war and of peace individually. If I relate these concepts to my own journey with mental health I can visualize how my mind and my body have at times existed at war with one another, both seeking the same peace from trauma, but disconnected. The lack of harmony enables a cascade of conflict, confusion, and fear. Being at war with the self or warring (in survival mode) against a harmful situation unfolds in a complex manner, especially if that trauma is carried through multiple generations. The devastations of war can bare themselves physically, but often, as the scars fade, the invisible wounds, emotional traumas, anxiety, trauma-induced ADHD, PTSD, and cPTSD rage more severely. The sinister aftermath of battle (both literal and metaphorical), when the dust has settled, too often leaves the survivor’s remaining injuries unrecognized, unfinished, on the inside, and sometimes resurfacing as panic attacks, racing heart rates, an urge to flee—the list goes on. There is seldom peace immediately after a trauma. Without proper time and care for wounds to heal, injuries can fester and compound. War and peace are not black and white; the space between is easier to leave hidden, but that gray space is also the only ground for true healing. The path to peace can take generations, making “peace” no easy feat. Accordingly, some of the world’s best efforts at “keeping the peace” do little more than apply palliative bandages after onslaughts of violence to cover a deadly (unsightly) injury.
Occupying the floor with ash on a panel of wood, Riddle of Peace/War (2022-ongoing) considers these layered topics by questioning who will ultimately be sacrificed for either “war” or “peace.” A misconstrued conception of the means by which to secure peace tips a violent scale for which humanity will always pay the price. Additionally, the individual handling of “war” and “peace” can also stand as a microcosm for the global struggle. Seeking peace internally can create desperation as it does within larger politics with fear and anxiety at their core. This desperation, anxiety, and fear screams, “seek peace BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.” However, speaking from the individual level, I have only been able to grasp authentic peace within myself through a place of care and unconditional love for the covered parts of myself deemed unfit to express in the open. Releasing blame, shame, and fear and growing in empathy for the parts of myself and my childhood that I was conditioned to keep hidden have been the only ways to work through the traumas in my own story and continue growing from a stronger foundation. Aptly constructing and simultaneously destroying the distinctions between “war” and “peace,” Ito’s exhibition demonstrates the necessity of considering life from multiple angles and reveals that nothing is truly black and white. Furthermore, my “path to peace” is an evolving effort, but at its center I have been learning to remove the shame in an effort to understand all parts of myself, just as Ito removes shaming from his exhibition for those who inflict violence in their efforts for “peace” recalled in his works. Even the title of the exhibition, Teach Me How to Love This World, acts as a macro glance for the core requisite of my inner healing, which could read: Teach Me How to Love Myself.
Kei Ito, Riddle of Peace/War, 2022-ongoing. Ash, wooden platform.
Though somber, Ito’s exhibition is not hopeless. On the contrary, his work is full of hope. Nothing difficult disappears by ignoring it; peace is not possible without confronting daunting realities and pushing through them with eyes and heart wide open. Ito’s work does just that. It is bearing the face of questions the world is afraid to ask, and bravely calling for healing in the gray areas. If nothing else, Teach Me How to Love This World has inspired a level of self-reflection and further affirmation of the importance of empathy and love toward myself and in confronting the world around me. Ito’s exhibition implores, “teach me how to love this world.” I suggest that a place to start is learning how to love ourselves.
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Kei Ito’s work is included in Teach Me How to Love This World at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from October 19 – December 10, 2022.
Teach Me To Love This World by Kei Ito, October 19 to December 10, 2022, at the Stamp Gallery | Written by Oliver Foley
When you think of an art gallery, what first comes to mind? For many, the mental image consists solely of paintings upon a blank, sterile wall. Yet, in Kei Ito’s new exhibit at Stamp Gallery, we find ourselves breaking out of this often limiting preconception. Ito’s Teach Me To Love This World is a work of installation art: the individual pieces are designed specifically for the space that they inhabit in the gallery, creating a unified sensory experience beyond that of traditional framed artworks. Ito constructs a chaotic audiovisual environment of multimedia artworks which immerses the viewer in the “liminal space between peace and war,” as he describes it. “I started as a photographer where I had this idea that photography can exist beyond a ‘frame on a wall,’ where art can be activated by the inclusion of audience and space,” Ito said. “Thus it was natural for me to dive into the world of installation art.”
Inherent to the art of installation is the theme of impermanence. The experience of an installation is unique to the space and time it is designed for. Although many philosophies regard change as a problem to be solved, Ito adopts it as a means of artistic expression. Every component of this exhibit accentuates the underlying impermanence of art, war, peace, life, death, time, space, and sound. One piece in particular, which highlights a very distinct take on the theme, is Talking Heads.
Kei Ito, Talking Heads (2022). Analog radio, two-channel audio, media player, radio transmitter, acrylic paint. 9-minute loop.
Talking Heads consists of two radios, each playing a different channel. Yet, these are no ordinary radio stations: Ito broadcasts his own audio through the airwaves. A transmitter sends two different signals to each radio, named Peace Radio and War Radio. “I want the audience to place their head between the two radios, getting disoriented by the bombardment of audio … when the audience places themself in the middle of these two radios, the positioning becomes the metaphors of the liminal space we as society exist in right now,” Ito replied when I asked him how he intended the piece to be experienced. Just as war and peace are fleeting things, so too is the auditory experience of this piece: the chaotic mix of passing words, sounds of war, and analog static puts the listener in a trancelike state.
“Who will be the next sacrifice for war…” the radio says. As if caught in a disagreement, the parallel radio replies, “who will be the next sacrifice for peace?” They argue atop the slow hum of wind, as tension rises. Air raid sirens begin as the urgent, foreboding tones of news broadcasters creep up from the static. The anxiety builds to a horrific crescendo as the sounds of war fill the room. Then, as suddenly as they began, the sirens cease, and the broadcast returns to a quiet hum, only interrupted by the refrain, “Who will be the next sacrifice for war… who will be the next sacrifice for peace.” But this peace is only transient, no matter how comforting it may feel.
When I first placed my head between the radios, I was surprised by the altered state of sensory perception it provoked. During the “wartime,” I could hardly recall the sense of calm that the peaceful, churning static inspired. This piece encourages the listener to notice themselves becoming “trapped in the moment” and become aware of their unconscious fear of change.
Talking Heads is just one of many pieces in this exhibit which exemplify impermanence. Elsewhere in the gallery, Ito presents the audience with text made of loose ash, infinite permutations of projected text, relics of the past and forecasts of the future. All of reality is governed by change, and Ito’s embrace of change in Teach Me To Love This World results in one of the most compelling installation exhibits you will have the pleasure of visiting.
Teach Me How to Love This World: Kei Ito will be on view in The Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland, College Park from October 19 through December 10, 2022. For more information on Kei Ito and his work, visit http://www.kei-ito.com/.
[detail] Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) by second-year MFA candidate Clay Dunklin, is available for view at The Stamp Gallery’s MEDIA LUX exhibition through May 19, 2018.This is the fourth installment of the MEDIA LUX artist interview series. MEDIA LUX features work by Clay Dunklin, Mason Hurley, Irene Pantelis, Monroe Isenberg, and Gina Takaoka.
Clay Dunklin | Second-Year Master of Fine Arts Candidate | Exhibiting in MEDIA LUX from April 2nd through May 19th, 2018 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Interview by Grace DeWitt
To start with some background, where are you from, and what brought you to the MFA program at the University of Maryland?
Really, I came here for location. I grew up in the middle-of-nowhere in East Texas where there is virtually no arts culture or art opportunities and then spent the last several years in Orlando, FL. Orlando is great but the contemporary art world there is still in a stage of infancy and opportunities are few. Here we sit in this nice place between Baltimore and Washington–even New York and Philadelphia are in close proximity. So there’s a lot to engage with and see. I really wanted to be someplace where I had all of that at my fingertips.
Can you briefly summarize the focus of your artistic practice?
My practice is very much project-based and contextual–I create a lot of parts but they really need to be installed and viewed together to make relationships and begin to make sense. I’m also not really media specific. I mean, my background is in drawing and I still think of all the work in terms of drawing, but my practice is not really just drawing, or sculpture, or video. It’s all of that. I guess I use whatever media feels right for the work.
Are there any artists you are following right now, or any specific artists who have inspired your work so far?
I’m really into Mark Leckey right now. He won the Turner Prize a few years ago and does video, image-based, and object-based works. He creates these great installations with found objects usually in front of a green screen. This really influenced the current piece, Catatonic Tomography Cycle, with the painting of that flat color on the wall and the flatness of the prints. His work made me think about achieving a kind of compression of the objects or alternatively a slight dimensionality as if just beginning to poke out into space. This is aided by the one-sided viewing of the work–even though there are objects it’s not really in the round like in Leckey’s work.
I’m really drawn to Jannis Kounellis’ work as well. For me, his installations sat in this really beautiful place between complexity and simplicity. Objects would be hung with rope from the ceiling or piled on the floor or he’d just fill a gallery with live horses–it was very straightforward like that. But the scale and the way he could fill a space was pretty awe-inspiring.
I also have a bit of a crush on Anicka Yi. Her exhibition at the Guggenheim for the Hugo Boss Prize was pretty fantastic. The piece Maybe She’s Born With It is like this huge inflatable plastic dome with tempura fried flowers in it. I kind of want to live in there.
I understand that you underwent a pretty extreme medical illness about this time last year, which plays a role in your work now. Did your practice focus on the body before this illness? How would you say your direction changed because of this experience?
Yeah, it was pretty scary actually. I had several extended stays in the hospital with this weird and kind of rare neurological disease. Most of my time in the hospital was spent just trying to figure out what this was. Then I got put on these wacky medicines that took my mind to weird places and really affected my body and how my body reacted to external stimuli. It was a wild ride for sure. I took a bit of time trying to figure out what to do with that whole experience in terms of my work and I honestly tried to avoid it. It couldn’t be helped though, it just began to creep into the studio, so I gave in and decided to just see where it takes the work. And I think a year was enough time to sort of process and be ready to talk about it. However, I don’t think it totally uprooted the direction of my practice. I’ve always been working with body as subject in some capacity–I come from a very heavy figure drawing background so I guess that is just kind of ingrained in me somewhere. I’m interested in the body as this sort of mediator between us and the world. It’s how we contextualize and make sense of everything. But I think technology is really redefining that role as we’re becoming more and more cyborgian with our phones and such. But your body still has to interface with technology so that specifically is where I want my work to be situated–that little meeting point between body and technology.
Can you share some information about the title of your MEDIA LUX installation, Catatonic Tomography Cycle?
This piece deals with my experience of being sick in a pretty overt way. Here I’m using some of the more conceptual elements of the work to steer the formal qualities and I think this becomes really evident through the title. A catatonic state is an altered mental status that can be brought on by neurological disorders. This is what I experienced several times throughout my illness. It was like being a zombie or something. I have little to no memory of those times but apparently I wouldn’t speak or even move really, like being frozen. This is referenced in the stillness of the image-based components and in the slow looping videos that maybe start to reference time as something structured in layers and less linearly. This directly relates to tomography,which is a kind of imaging used most commonly in the medical field where the whole is broken up and viewed as layers (think MRI images). Again, this is referenced in some of the actual physical medical imagery used, but, it is also labeling all of these individual components as layers or slices of the whole that still contain information about the whole, and then compressing all of that into a kind of flatness (back to the Mark Lackey reference). And cycle goes back conceptually to the cyclical nature of the disease but also formally to the looping of the videos and as an indicator of the singular installation being composed of many parts: like an opera or song cycle in music composition.
Detail from one of two looping videos in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation in MEDIA LUX at The Stamp Gallery.
We’ve talked a little bit about how the footage in your installation touches on ideas of creation. Can you go into further detail about how the footage builds into the more complex idea of the MEDIA LUX installation as a whole?
This work has really taken on a kind of language all its own, as I think most works tend to do, and if you understand the artist as mythmaker, this language becomes inherently mythological. So I am constantly reflecting on the relationship between what is a deeply personal mythological language and a more universal one. I was reflecting on this relationship between creation and destruction and how water or fluid can act between those two modes. I think about the Grand Canyon where water has destroyed the landscape yet simultaneously created a new one or how this fluid around my brain acts as protection yet is the main antagonist in the story of my illness. Newborns emerge from a fluid incubator in what is a very traumatic process. None of this is new. But how do we reference these ideas that are inherent to our body in a relevant and deeply personal way? What kind of contemporary Athene can emerge from the fluid site of the head? The Native Americans around what is California today had a creation myth of humans being made from clay of the earth, as most cultures did, but with the added idea that the creator-god mixed spit with the earth to give humans life. So again, what does that mean for a contemporary body as a fluid site?
I’m interested in hearing more about your photographic/record-keeping processes and preferences. Could you highlight some other works of yours that applied captured imagery to installation? What are your intentions when it comes to image resolution and image manipulation in your work?
Like I said earlier, I’m interested in this intersection of body and technology and specifically how we negotiate those two as mediators between the self and the world. We’ve really embarked on a time where we’re beginning to experience everything through tech, even things we’re physically present for. Think about a concert where people snap every single song. Yes, now all of your friends can experience that too through an app on their phone but also you as the physically present viewer are experiencing a live event through compressed, digital, pixelated images and videos via your handheld device. That’s fascinating to me. It’s becoming second nature to understand our world through compressed images. So in terms of the work, I’m not intentionally after low quality images verging on pixilated abstraction just like I’m not intentionally after the most high quality images aimed at some kind of illusion. I don’t care about the illusion. If the image even slightly or in a subversive way recalls a quality of imagery experienced in the everyday then it brings it into that space of body/technology interface. It also begins to recall or make visible the process of the image-making, similar to how the process of tomographic imaging is inherently stamped on the images it produces simply because of the kind of images it produces. It’s a performative process where the thing is the action of its own doing and in this way, the images now become objects.
Detail of water images, blacklight, and clay component in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation.
Thinking back to the installation at The Stamp Gallery, what drew you to the use of those dark water images, applied directly on the left portion of the installation wall?
Those images come from documentation of a previous project where I was changing or obscuring the surface of my body by applying charcoal powder. I would then wash that off and be left with this deep dark charcoal water. From that, I began to pull paper thinking that these new surfaces and objects could be made from my body sluff. So the water became a transformative site where something new could emerge–this goes back to your previous question about creation and the metamyth. I had prints of these images and it just kind of hit me that they needed to be included with this project. The water references fluid around the brain but also starts to resemble images of space. That push and pull between something recognizable and something alien interests me and speaks to cosmic or magical thinking and some of the mental imagery conjured while on medication that was making me totally loopy. The application and composition of the prints is pointing to digital glitch in a way. The long linear format of each print is kind of filmic but really isn’t about time as we perceive it. As said earlier, it’s about something layered or sliced and reassembled.
Detail of wall sculpture in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation.
MEDIA LUX is an exhibition that presents five artists’ interpretation of, or association with, light. How does light relate to your concept in Catatonic Tomography Cycle?
Light is really a formal element here. When the decision was made to have the gallery dimly lit I thought that was great because video work is self-illuminating. For the rest of the installation I had to be more strategic about lighting. I knew the sculpture emerging from the wall was the one thing I wanted to be lit pretty intensely. Then the blue glow of the black light was again a formal and strategic color choice as it stands in relationship to the warm yellow of that spotlight. So that really was a further iteration of the colors found in the video works.
Detail of wall drawing in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation, available for view through May 19, 2018 in The Stamp Gallery.
Is there any advice you have for undergraduate artists or others at the beginning of their art careers?
I think one of the biggest things that I needed to hear as an undergrad was to really invest in the learning processes. It’s easy for people who have some talent to take the time in studio for granted or to not really put themselves out there because they’re afraid of failure. Make a ton, experiment a ton, be confident even in ‘failure,’ and pull everything you can out of your instructors and fellow students. Otherwise, you’ll likely only be performing at a slightly higher level than when you started college. How much good will that have really done you?
I know you have an installation up right now at VisArts, yolk | shell | source | system, a collaborative with another UMD MFA student, Bekí Basch. Anything else you have going on or coming up that you’d like to promote here?
Yeah! This was actually my first collaborative project and it was really the best experience. It’s a huge 70 foot long window display a couple of blocks from VisArts. So it definitely presented its own set of challenges but made for some great experimentation. We had a reception and artist talk for that on May 4th, and the installation will be up through June.
Clay Dunklin’s work is included in MEDIA LUX at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from April 2nd through May 19th, 2018.
