UNFOLD from January 30 to April 1, 2023 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Isabella Chilcoat
I first encountered artist Elliot Doughtie’s work last November of 2022 during my Contemporary Art Purchasing Program cohort’s visit to his studio in Baltimore City. We arrived early in the morning (in a university van) for a full day of gallery and studio visits, and Doughtie was first on the docket. He greeted us outside of Area 405, the historic Baltimore warehouse that houses a number of working artists’ studios and emits the familiar musk that so many historic properties possess after sheltering decades of dust from the bustle of busy humans. Surrounded by the energies of creatives past and present, my team members and I were eager to explore the brick-walled universe of expression and curiosity.
Enter Doughtie’s studio. The floors are gray wooden boards met by drywall panels in between exposed brick. The drywall patches are covered in graph paper sketches of concepts, ideas, and the two sock drawings that now hang in the Stamp Gallery as part of the group exhibition UNFOLD. There are two rooms, one main studio space testing the display of sculpture and installations followed by a narrow hallway to a smaller workspace. Throughout the studio are socks. Not real socks, but heavy, brittle sculptures and mock-ups capturing the exact texture of fabric created through an all but easy process of pouring plaster into molds cast from bulk-buys of generic gym socks. Inside the smaller workspace room resides a circular saw, molds, and other scattered tools. Imagine a public education shop class room, then make it half the size, then fill it with various sizes of plaster fragments, pipe, and little empty replica bottles of Testosterone.
Just as the plaster fragments spread across the floor of the studio, Doughtie’s finished sock sculptures rest on the wooden floors in the Gallery. What most visitors do not know is that they weigh around eighty pounds, can shatter, and are not, in fact, real socks. The closest element they bear to the fabric socks used to create their molds is the red striped detail above the ankle. The red dye in the original sock transferred to the absorbent plaster during casting. An expert dupe, these conceptual socks would likely crush under the weight of a foot, which is what makes them so fantastic as works of art! They subvert any ordinary conception people hold about socks; Doughtie’s are not the resilient little things we banish to hampers, closet floors, or washing machines every evening. Instead the art socks on the floor are metaphors for the crushing weight of our society’s masculine stereotypes.
Further exemplified in the diptych drawings of socks on the gallery’s first wall, the illustrations oppose each other by contrasting a picture of many socks crowded together with a picture of just one sock in isolation. Despite what initially feels like a playful subject, the illustration with only one sock is chillingly lonely. The single sock floats at the bottom of its page as if staring at the crowd of intertwining socks separated by two frames. Socks come in pairs, like binaries, and can only fulfill their prescribed purpose if they are together. The idea of losing one sock from a pair likely raises neck hairs for anyone who has scoured a house in search of that elusive piece of polyester-blend hosiery. It also highlights the devastating pressures to conform to a stereotype or standardized identity for belonging. Focusing on a single, separated sock from the cluster really spotlights the metaphor for stereotypical masculinity and exposes its weaknesses beyond the safety of sameness. These all-but-essential unspoken codes dictating binary gender expression inflict droves of problems, and Doughtie’s single sock captures some of the feelings associated with rejecting the standard.
The lonely sock suggests dual ideas that the pressure of assimilation is crushing, and, ironically, so is the isolation. I am grateful for the physical space in between the picture frames, however, because I needed it to remind me about the gray area. Our world is frequently so suffocatingly black and white, but life is much more complex and colorful beyond the binary.
Elliot Doughtie’s work is included in UNFOLD at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from January 30 – April 1, 2023.
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 Ellen Zhang
Bold red streaks, ominous ringing, whirrings of rotating projector shutters… each piece in Teach Me How to Love This World plays an integral part in illustrating a past, present, and future world grappling with violence and peace. What I like about Kei Ito’s work is that it’s direct and straightforward without undermining its complexities. As a viewer, I am amazed by how he has balanced artistic choices, abstract themes (like the meaning of peace), and the factuality of the impacts of nuclear war. Together, these three elements create the necessary experience of being caught off guard that precedes a stage of reflection.
Stepping foot into this exhibition for the very first time, the piece that caught my attention was Teach Me How to Love This World: Sacrifice. The immediate appearance of a blood-red peace sign dripping down the canvas is jarring, intimidating, and contradicting. The perception of tranquility, from the peace symbol, is intruded by the blood-red color, enhancing Ito’s message that peace doesn’t come without fatal sacrifice. Ito reflects the destructive nature of war weapons through artistic choices that don’t sugarcoat and, instead, speak volumes on how nuclear war is a source of fear and intimidation. For those that are conflict-avoidant like me, an initial glimpse is enough to instill a sense of trepidation and uneasiness.
Kei Ito, Teach Me How to Love This World: Sacrifice, 2022. Unprimed canvas, spray paint, print on aluminum dibond, 36x48x3 in.
The question of “whose peace, whose sacrifice” splattered across the top and bottom of the canvas adds to the power of the piece. It’s a transparent move that introduces perplexing questions between humanity and war, unlike the sanitized version we often get from the mainstream media. By proposing the question of “whose peace, whose sacrifice,” Ito also eases the viewer into a stage of reflection: Who are the victims of nuclear war? Who benefits from it? Is there even a clear distinction between the two or are we all unknowing victims of nuclear war? While I haven’t found the answers to these questions, I appreciate how Ito’s work is centralized in questions rather than statements. Nothing is definitive and, perhaps, this is on purpose. Ito breaks the stigma of reflecting on war by encouraging us, the viewers, to weigh on an integral theme of conflict: someone’s peace is brought through someone else’s suffering. During Ito’s artist talk, he even encouraged his audience to consider everyday life through the lens of sacrifice, war, and peace. For example, he mentioned how fast fashion is one of many suppressed examples of those benefiting from another’s exploitation.
Situated in the center of the canvas is an inverted photograph of a goat receiving a blood transfusion by three masked doctors. Here, Ito adds additional layers of identity, fact, and questioning. The presence of a goat pays homage to the significance of animals ingrained in Japanese culture. At the same time, the photograph is rooted in factual evidence that depicts the devastating effects of atomic bomb testing. The original photograph was taken by George Skadding in 1947 and captures the moment when a goat, exposed to radiation from an A-bomb test on Bikini Atoll Island, receives a blood transfusion as it lies strapped to a surgical table at the Bethesda Naval Medical Research Institute, MD. Reflecting on the photo with its historical backdrop in mind subjects the viewer to numerous questions: Why did Ito choose a historical moment that took place in Maryland? Why is the photograph placed where it is? Why is it inverted? With no answers in plain sight, we are encouraged to ponder the artistic choices Ito has made. To me, Teach Me How to Love This World: Sacrifice is a piece that embodies reflection. And quite literally, the contents on the canvas are mirrored, portraying the interdependent relationship between those who enjoy peace and those who sacrifice. At the same time, the viewers can reflect on how power and politics determine who is impacted by war. The photograph alone is a testament to how some, if not all, can have their peace stripped from them at any given moment and with no say at all.
Despite the way Ito explores the dichotomy between peace and war, his exhibition is certainly not despairing in nature. By balancing the factual and the abstract, he breaks the silence on taboo subjects and builds fruitful conversations, open to anyone regardless of their background, belief systems, and ideas. Ito brings a sense of vulnerability into the gallery, graciously inviting us to explore, and prompting reflections to remember.
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/.
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 How To Love This World from October 19th to December 10th, 2022, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by James Cho
Emblazoned on the floor of the gallery lies Kei Ito’s Riddle of Peace/War. Made solely of loose, stenciled ash on a wooden platform, the work not only physically presents viewers with the dichotomy between World War II and the ensuing peace for America, but also guides viewers through the bombing.
“WHO WILL BE THE NEXT SACRIFICE FOR THE PEACE? WHO WILL BE THE NEXT SACRIFICE FOR THE WAR?”
By asking viewers these two questions, Ito creates this “riddle” about World War II and its aftermath. Despite the war having ended and peace being restored to the US, Japan was left in ruins and Europe alongside the rest of the world would soon face the Cold War between the US and the USSR. For Japan, the end of the war, signalled by warning sirens similar to those playing from the radios in Ito’s sound installation Talking Heads, left its mark on Ito’s grandfather, who witnessed the bombing of Hiroshima firsthand. Much like how his grandfather’s family, friends, and colleagues in the city left only outlines of where they stood when the nuke exploded, so too does Ito’s Riddle of Peace/War.
Riddle of Peace/War (detail)
In tandem with the rest of the exhibition, Riddle of Peace/War serves as Ito’s way of performing the scene at Hiroshima that his grandfather experienced. Even though Ito himself isn’t present to act in this performance, he has extracted key parts of that day and placed them into the exhibition for all to see as if he were. The direct aftermath of what Ito’s grandfather witnessed at Hiroshima is dashed across Riddle of Peace/War as a warning for future generations against repeating this tragedy, as Ito explained during his artist talk at the Gallery on October 20. Going further than Japan, however, Ito uses Talking Heads to further his “universal” dichotomy of war and peace across time by sounding nuclear sirens from Hawaii and Japan during North Korean nuclear testing in recent years and Ukrainian sirens after an air raid by Russia from the radio on the right while peace messages emanate from the radio on the left. In this way, the central theme of the dichotomy of peace and war comes to fruition in both Riddle of Peace/War and Talking Heads. When addressing Riddle of Peace/War during his talk, Ito continued to stress the connections between generational trauma worldwide, suggesting that 9/11 in the US paralleled the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as events that were not only “delicate” but so “fuelled by the idea of national identity that it became so taboo to talk to the victims” of the Cold War, 9/11, the war in Ukraine, and for Ito, the bombing that his grandfather witnessed.
But let’s get back to the physical organization of Riddle of Peace/War instead of its psychological organization. The ephemerality of the text, which can be deformed by a slight unsettling of the ash, serves as a reminder of the fleeting quality of both life and memory. The outlines of those vaporized from the bombings in Japan slowly fade, while new buildings rise from the ashes of those destroyed, sacrificed for “peace in our time.” Just as the ash stenciled into Ito’s questions can be easily blown away by a simple sneeze or brisk walk over the course of time, the victims of the wars of the past and of ongoing conflicts today, coupled with the renewed threat of nuclear warfare with Russia, are also delicate. While decades have passed since these events and their outlines are physically gone, they will never be truly forgotten, as a kind of psychological object permanence. If we forget, we are doomed to repeat an endless cycle of sacrifice for the sake of war and peace, reducing the magnitude of these tragedies and their aftermath to nothing more than a couple of lines in a history book.
Distinct Chatter from April 8 to May 20, 2022 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Hannah Zozobrado
Along one of the walls of the gallery hangs a black-and-white striped shirt, cut into curved strips that defy the thin, horizontal stripes. The slits on the left and right side of the tee curve symmetrically in opposite directions. The work is Charlotte Richardson-Deppe’s Just a Shirt (2021), which also has multiple colored pins poking into each strip of material, sticking out of the shirt and giving the piece overall dimension. For Richardson-Deppe, the chopped piece of clothing is a reminder of a bitter story.
The story that accompanies Just a Shirt is as follows:
It is the spring of Richardson-Deppe’s senior year of college, and she and her friends are spending a night in a Chicago hotel. They encounter a middle-aged man in the elevator, and he strikes casual conversation with them. They all arrive at their hotel room soon after; the hotel room’s phone begins to ring and Richardson-Deppe’s friend answers the phone – the caller is the man from the elevator, asking if the girl in the black and white shirt is in the room. Richardson-Deppe is the girl in the black and white striped shirt.
The friend lies and hangs up the phone. They are all scared, and they call their male friend – “tall and strong” – to request their room change at the front desk. They finally change their room, but the fear and paranoia does not depart as they ensure that the doors are locked.
While the title is Just a Shirt, the material is more than that to Richardson-Deppe. It is, in fact, just a shirt in its appearance, but this shirt is a reminder of a chilling dilemma that she had to experience as a woman and had to resolve with the help of a man. It is a reminder of the feeling of hopelessness that comes with knowing you are being surveilled by an unknown man with unknown intentions – something that many women experience in a patriarchal society.
Charlotte Richardson-Deppe, Just a Shirt, 2021. Shirt, pins, 16” x 18”.
The cuts that curve outward from the shirt’s middle center look as though they take the form of the female reproductive system. This piece is representative of what it means to be a woman in a society where men can be either predatory or heroic – and either way, the woman is to succumb and yield to man, whether that be as their prey or damsel in distress.
The shirt is formed by these symmetric slits in the material, and the rightward and leftward curve of these cuts on the shirt cause a split in the overall work. With this, the tee represents womanhood while also drawing a literal and metaphorical line between the experiences of women and men.
The pins on this work, which are typically used to help in mending rips and tears at cloth, only jab into the material with an ostensible purpose of pinning the strips to the wall. The pins also make the shirt feel unmoving; this is to say that the sentiment of reinforcing society’s rigid social and patriarchal structures are to remain unchanged, or at least difficult to change.
Just a Shirt shows that objects, contrary to their simple appearances, can often take up the space beyond their physical composition. They encompass the memories that evoke strong emotions, like disgust and fear, while also becoming a symbol and motif of lived experiences; this piece, in the context of what had happened as the shirt was worn, is critical commentary on what it is like to be a woman: having to keep an eye out for our well-being and, like Richardson-Deppe, even sleep with one eye open.
Just a Shirt tells a story that many women are able to relate to – no matter the shirt they choose to wear.
Charlotte Richardson-Deppe’s work is included in Distinct Chatter at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from April 18 – May 20, 2022.
For more information on Charlotte Richardson-Deppe, visit the University of Maryland’s Department of Art.
For more information on Distinct Chatter and related events, visit the Stamp Website.
[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.
So you’re walking by the Stamp Gallery one afternoon. Peaking through the glass exterior, you see that there are boxes and packing paper scattered throughout. You see some power tools on the benches, and a ladder leaning against the corner. You notice random walls that seem to be hanging out in limbo in the middle of the space. Walking past the entrance, you find a sign taped to the door: “Closed for installation, please come back for our opening next week!”
Ever wanted to know just what goes into the installation of a gallery exhibition?
The past week at the Stamp Gallery has been quite a busy one, with the installation of our current exhibition featuring new arrivals for the Contemporary Art Purchasing Program (CAPP). As a docent, I get to take part in this installation process. As such, I thought I’d offer a little glimpse into a few of the more subtle, never-occurred-to-me-before-I-started-working-here types of things that go on behind the scenes of an installation.
Vinyl
When you first walk into the Stamp Gallery and start reading about what the exhibit is about, you are reading the vinyl. I’d like to start off by admitting that, before I started working at the gallery, I was under the impression that someone had to come and actually hand-paint the words onto the wall…which I’m glad is not the case! After the exhibition overview is typed up in a Word doc, it is sent to be blown up in size and then printed out on a kind of sticker-like paper. Before sticking this onto the wall, we measure the length/width of the sheet, take a ruler to the wall, level it, and make light pencil marks for guidelines. Next, we peel off the outer layer of the sheet, which uncovers the sticky part that goes onto the wall. Once we have the sheet up on the wall, we smooth out any wrinkles and press it against the wall as much as possible – this makes it easier to peel the paper off without peeling the actual letters off as well. The final step is to do the actual peeling!
Walls
In the gallery, we have“moveable” walls that are stored in the back. The wall holding Titus Kaphar’s The Jerome Project (Asphalt and Chalk) XII is a moveable wall.
These walls allow us the mobility to create new, smaller spaces within our existing gallery space. They also provide extra surface area to accommodate more pieces, draw attention to particular works, as well as provide general interest and variability to the eye. For this exhibition in particular, we added a wall behind the podium holding Wafaa Bilal’s Perseus Beheading Medusa and Pink David in order to direct focus onto the pieces, since they are relatively small objects in comparison to the space.
Lighting
Tracks along the ceiling of the gallery provide grooves that the lights hook into. There are three tracks spanning the length of the space, and five tracks running widthwise. The lights themselves consist of a bulb attached to a frame that can be maneuvered to adjust the angle of the light accordingly. In addition, there are metal bars within the hook of the frame that conduct electricity and make the light turn on when attached to the track. Depending on the needs of the exhibition/pieces, the lights can be placed so that they either “spotlight” or provide a softer, glow to the work. When spotlighting, the lights are generally placed closer to the piece, which provides a very direct focus. Setting the light farther back creates more of an atmosphere and harmonization for the piece as well as the space surrounding it. Other things to keep in mind when setting up lights is reflection, shadows, and the color casted by the bulb. For the pieces that contain a glass covering, we had to consider the effects of possible reflections caused by our lighting choices. In addition, we can control the degree and location of shadows by light placement. For Ellington Robinson’s Oath of the Imperialists, we played around with the distance of the lights from the work in order to “shift” the shadows around.
Finally, some bulbs are older than others and cast a softer, more yellow hue than the newer ones, which typically cast a very bright, verging on greenish tint. We usually try to match the shades of light throughout the exhibit.
Of course, there are many other aspects that go into a gallery installation that I haven’t mentioned here – each show is unique in terms of the methods used to bring it together. For a closer look at the results of our installation, be sure to check out the opening reception of CAPP New Arrivals 2015 this Friday, September 25th between 6-10pm.
See you there!
Carmen Dodl
A Contemporary Art Dedicated Space at the University of Maryland
