This is a long exposure from April 23 to May 21, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Jasjot Kaur Gill
Imagine extracting two decades of your life from your memory into a set of photographs. What would remain? A few clear shots of joy or pain, emptiness or vague fragments? Years reduced to colors and shapes, objects, repetitive paths? Fleeting moments preserved, while others slip through entirely?
Jeffrey Hampshire’s Orientation, from the ‘This is a Long Exposure’ exhibition at STAMP Gallery, asks how do we carry memory, from the past and present, and still moments through time? How do we remember the places we pass through every day on our walk back and forth from work to home, and what do those visuals say about our relationships with our natural surroundings, space, ourselves, and our story?
Orientation is an evocative visual journal created from the artist Jeffrey’s own daily journey from home to work, college, still moments captured in between, caught by the attention of the eye. In the series of small photographs lined up in rows, some moments are subconsciously registered by being on a repetitive path, others a new experience releasing dopamine while some a connection to the past. Each photograph documents a pause—a glance, a texture, a corner of his workspace, a moment of peace and silence in nature, or a still object of the world that caught his attention. And yet, as a whole, the series of photographs refuses to be purely documentary, placed in a jumbled manner with no direct connection to a timeline. These are not moments captured for the sake of memory, echoes of one’s values and perception of the immediate surroundings, residues and questions. Jeffrey arranges the photographs intuitively, allowing opaque and transparent layers, visual disruptions, and blank spaces to guide our experience through the installation.
These photographs reflect the unnoticed, and noticed in our lives: the cluttered stairwells, the roads and signage, the plain sky silently watching over, the voice echoing through the pipes, wires and roads, the trees seen at a quick glance, a delay to work by the fallen tree. And yet, through repetition and scale, these “insignificant” still moments become portals to the viewer’s perception. As you view these photographs you ponder upon moments that don’t register at first but linger in the subconscious.
Orientation, by Jeffrey Hamphire, 2025. Inkjet print, transparency film, projection.
In an age where headphones filter out atmospheric sound and our commutes blur into our subconscious memory, Orientation is an alternative: a meditation on the act of seeing, seeing differently, seeing through time and space, seeing in different dimensions. It asks us how we interact with natural and man-made environments, how we disregard, how we dismiss—and how even forgotten, unnoticed visuals may hold space and meaning, appearing on our memory board.
Some images seem wiped out of existence, while others faded and abstract—reflecting the way memory functions. Do we really recall that morning sky, or just the feeling of having been late? Do we remember the street corner, or only the stress tied to it? Do we remember the conversation we had on the side of the road, or was it a made up memory, a moment from the past perhaps? We walk the same paths each day, yet something always changes. Do we even realise this, the weather, our thoughts, a detour from a construction zone we didn’t expect. The duality captured through the tension between routine and change makes the viewer wonder, and look more closely.
Standing in front of this piece, I found myself thinking, I believe I have some similar images stored in my photographic memory. Who else has walked this road? Do our memories overlap and what are they thinking as they walk through it? It is a strange thought perhaps, but strangely comforting to know how connected we are with others in the environment around us, if only to pause and pay more attention.
In Orientation, the artist Jeffrey Hampshire gives a layered, intuitive, form to that memory and invites us to reconsider the invisible architecture of our lives. To listen, to see, and maybe to remember with a renewed perspective.
This Is A Long Exposure from April 23 to May 21, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Oliver Foley
Throughout my time as a docent at the Stamp Gallery, I have been fascinated by the gallery’s most notable architectural quirk: a short hallway ending in a door that never opens. Behind the wall which greets visitors as they enter the gallery lies this hallway, a subspace enclosed on three sides with a gap at the top allowing in ambient light from the primary space. This space exists in service of a door which must exist, yet is unused, like a vestigial organ of the building as a whole. The resultant alcove, often indirectly illuminated, serves as the perfect vessel for pieces which create artificial spaces. Permeation (2025) by Jeffery Hampshire is one such piece, making use of the auditory isolation and low light level to transport the viewer into a spatial imaginary.
Permeation (2025) by Jeffery Hampshire
Like an architectural womb, the nook insulates the viewer from the exhibition as a whole. Two large white curtains hang from the wall, obscuring the vestigial door behind the semi-transparent fabric. Behind this curtain is a projection of a scene through a window, alternating between the two sides of the virtual window. Along with each perspective is audio, the sounds of birds and nature when looking outside, and the sounds of plates, footsteps, and household movement when looking in. This audio corresponds to what is on the other side of the window, subverting the intuitive expectation. This subversion was not immediately obvious, yet reflects the unique role of the window to transport the user out of the space they are in. There is a distinctly peaceful quality to this piece; it feels like a moment frozen in time being viewed from an abstractly omniscient angle. The walls of the alcove shield the viewer from the ambient sounds of the building, transporting them into an imaginary space beyond a physical space.
Permeation (2025) by Jeffery Hampshire
Two projections appear: a crisp, defined image on the wall behind the curtain, and a diffuse, fuzzy image on the curtain itself. The projection takes on the materiality of the curtain and imbues it with a soft glow, giving the illusion of natural light through a window. Alluding to the title of the piece, it is not the direct projection which sells the atmosphere, but the radiance created by its permeation through the fabric. In the sterility of a gallery environment, softness in light is oftentimes lost in pursuit of clear visibility, yet the darkness of this liminal-vestigial vestibule harbors the luminous subtlety of Hampshire’s piece. The realism of soft light is present within the projection, too: the light sources in the virtual spaces themselves permeate through semi-translucent media. When looking in, a lampshade blunts the lightbulb, and the view out into nature is lit diffusely by sunlight through a tree. The window acts as the inversion of reality, a door which is visually impenetrable and functionally inaccessible. Jeffery Hampshire’s Permeation not only creates spaces, but portals into these spaces which transcend the limitations of the gallery setting.
Stamp Gallery is a modular space, whose layout and flow of movement changes dramatically with each exhibition. Moveable walls and track lights create a blank slate for each exhibition’s unique demands. Yet, the back micro-hallway remains constant, an inner space which surrounds and immerses the viewer. Permeation masterfully engages with this architectural oddity, elevating it beyond a simple video booth by harnessing the inherent liminality of the corridor. The boundary dissolves between real and imagined, inside and outside, light and shadow; Hampshire’s work illuminates the beautiful mundane of the window as a threshold.
This is a long exposure from April 23 to May 21, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Rachel Schmid-James
Déjà vu is a phenomenon very few are unfamiliar with. The sensation that one has been somewhere or experienced something before often creates an uneasy feeling within its host. This disruption of thinking is abrupt and yet fleeting- leaving just as quickly as it came. In Julia Reising’s looping short film This is a Long Exposure, she combines prose and image to examine the overlap between movement, time, and the illusion of recall. Through the various frames of the video, Reising herself or objects such as a chair and lamp are seen interacting with a red linoleum box adorned with a tile-like pattern, a mobile corner. The piece then appears again in two inkjet photographs titled Linoleum Room Landscape One and Two, which are positioned as if in conversation with one another—each on opposing walls that converge to create a corner. Though the box is present, it is intangible—never appearing in its palpable form. Its absence highlights the idea of liminality: and poses the question of “how can we feel familiarity despite never being present with something?”
Reising in a still from This is a Long Exposure, 2025, video
Since Albert Einstein first theorized that time was relative and nonlinear, but rather conceptualized through culture, not much has changed in our own human interpretations of how it functions. The human brain struggles to understand time in any way other than moving in a straight line. Our cycles influence this: all living things are born and die, an eternal circle. In This is a Long Exposure, Julia Reising plays with both time and space- challenging the way we perceive it. She questions whether anything can ever truly be still in our dimensional universe, and how medium, environment, and cyclicality can be reconciled.
The words that accompany the visual scenes of the video add a layer to the narrative Reising is building. It both starts and ends with Reising saying the phrase “And I am happy to have been here before,” intentionally inducing a sense of déjà vu within the viewer. She then comments on the foreign feeling the box activates, saying “unfamiliar. A door, a cornice moulding, a chair, a lamp.” She makes the viewer question their perception of domestic objects through their positioning in the corner, as well as our perception of where these objects fit into a space.
The diptych prints enhance this message. In one, the box is set against a green, leafy landscape, the shadow of the photographer and a branch visible and almost bleeding onto it. In the other, the box is the only object set against a stark, white wall- giving the opportunity for it to gain the viewer’s full attention. The simple backgrounds allow for reflection and for the feeling of intimacy with this inanimate object to continue to fester. By the end of the video and upon leaving the gallery, the viewer feels intrinsically tied to this intangible concept- a concept that encapsulates both the physical and the metaphorical. The ways we experience the metaphysical can be translated onto a smaller scale, as they have in this exhibition.
Julia Reising, Linoleum Room Landscape (One and Two), 2025, inkjet print diptych
The reason humans are so rigid in our unwillingness to perceive time in a nonlinear way is that it disrupts our cultural creations of life and the universe. We find meaning in these systems and their strict nature, something so cemented that we don’t understand how to exist without them. Reising seeks to meld the familiar and unfamiliar into one, pushing the bounds of what is and what could be- that one can be somewhere and nowhere all at once, that we can truly accept the message “and I am happy to have been here before.”
Julia Reising’s work is included in This is a long exposure at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from April 23 to May 21, 2025
This is a long exposure from April 23 to May 21, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Olivia DiJulio
When viewing and creating digital art, how can we see beyond the glass? With image-making, how can we elevate the flat nature of screens? Transcending the medium of the digital realm, This is a long exposure explores the methods and artistic revisions in reframing environments and reshaping the everyday with digital and analog means.
Photography, videography, and digital projection are deeply integrated in this exhibit as central conveyors of time. These mediums are concentrated on generating and controlling visual phenomena. The camera and the lens have the power to capture light into a still image, and putting those images together in a sequence creates the motion picture. However, there is often a predictability in the traditional presentation of video feeds. In a hyper-digitized world, the novelty of screens has become an everyday interaction. As users of technology, there has been a standard expectation of clarity and instantaneous feedback.
Suspension by Jeffery Hampshire aims to reconfigure these notions of viewing into sources of motion, angles, and change. The piece features four monitors, each with custom acrylic castings to mount the transparent film. Both the acrylic mountings and film have a digital quality to them, almost replicating refresh effects of CRT TVs. The film itself was made using inkjet printing techniques, and is the highlight of this work. Each video feed features looping video feeds of suburban sights. There is something inherently human and man-made, featuring construction, architecture, a fallen e-bike, and a small forest clearing. The familiar sights combined with the unorthodox presentation create a unique composition within the genre of video installations.
Video art as a medium speaks to the very form of light. In combination with film and physical optics, Hampshire works by rebending, refracting, and changing our perspective of reality. Rather than just isolating the feed, the negative and positive space created with the film forms new dimensions to the piece. The contrast between the video feed and the transparent film seeks to form optical tension.The literal layering of images also speaks to the processes of filmmaking and digital art creation. Digital artists often work in layers to have control over the independent aspects of the piece. Layers are meant to be invisible, unnoticed, and embedded into an artwork. However, Suspension turns this workflow into a tangible outcome, by refracting and distorting the video feed below.
Quite fully, there is a visual hierarchy at play. The physical barriers and materiality of the film used in Suspension challenge the viewer to reconsider the ways we perceive the world. The film, being transparent, is not necessarily erasing what is there, but recontextualizing it into an ever changing viewing experience. It is more so an interruption rather than a deletion. You will never get the full image when looking at the piece head-on, and viewers are encouraged to move and find the spaces between the video and material.
Hampshire challenges the traditional linearity of observing video installations by adding additional visual depth to his work. Exploring the transformative nature of video, he promotes the ideals of the ever changing states of reality. Our environments will never be static, and neither is the dynamic form of video and multimedia works. Rather, there is always motion in the perceived stillness of the mundane. Suspension emphasizes the role of physical materials in shaping how we understand time and imagery. The physical materials remind us that what we see can always be filtered by tools and contexts. Through this lens, Hampshire opens up a broader conversation about the optics of perception, questioning not just what we see, but how we can reconsider the driving factors of attention and perception in the world around us.
Open Ended Narratives from February 18th to April 5th, 2025, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Rachel Schmid-James
Just as the cogs of a machine must fit together seamlessly to work, an exhibition must build and mesh into something greater than the individual pieces. In Schroeder Cherry’s current show, Open Ended Narratives, the themes emerge like threads, twisting together to create a fluid experience. While certain motifs show up consistently throughout pieces, the Baltimore-based artist is adamant that he has no interest in telling one story. “There is no one story; viewers bring their own experiences to each piece,” Cherry writes in his artist statement.
The idea that an artist has one message they are attempting to convey is simplistic and confining, as art can mean many things to different people. However, this is not to say that these thematic elements have no context outside of the viewer’s own. The image of the watermelon pops up more than seventeen times throughout the works displayed at the gallery. If the viewer has no knowledge of the historical context Cherry is referencing, the significance of the symbol may go unnoticed.
The watermelon stereotype first emerged in the Southern United States in the 1860s, shortly after the end of the Civil War and the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Former enslavers and Confederate sympathizers were flailing to combat the beginnings of the Reconstruction era, and observing that many formerly enslaved people were growing watermelons on their farms for profit, created a caricature to represent African Americans as immature and dirty. Over time this farce of a statement worked its way into generations of people, becoming a belief that many learned casually through subliminal messages. It appeared in caricatures on children’s television shows and other representations of minstrelsy. In contemporary history, politicians continue to push this stereotype among others to draw in racist supporters.
Unfortunately, the original meaning of the watermelon has become tainted with these narratives, but the African diaspora has worked to restore its original meaning in the community. Before white supremacists got their hands on the symbol of the watermelon, it stood as a message of liberation and autonomy for formerly enslaved individuals in the South. Cherry’s work reclaims the image, raising it into idolatry, a symbol of resistance, while also planting the seeds for a more positive interpretation of it for current and future Black children.
In Cherry’s piece Twins (Future Voter Series), the watermelon takes the form of the two young girls’ swimsuits. They stand with their arms around each other, beaming at an invisible camera. They are proud of their swimsuits, making no effort to hide and instead exuding excitement over being seen in them. While each viewer is invited to add their own details to these girls’ stories, it cannot be said that they yet understand the burden of the stereotype. They become a symbol of hope for the present, that we may someday completely filter out the muddled narrative created by hate, and return it to its revolutionary roots.
Schroeder Cherry, Future Voters #12, Twins, 2021, mixed media on wood.
The question of divinity is also raised in Cherry’s wall sconce pieces, which depict Black figures as one of the holiest symbols in Christianity: angels. Combining this with the symbol of the watermelon, most notably in the piece Angel Sconce #11, Red Wings, which features the image prominently throughout. Angels are also a symbol with a racist past, often depicting the ideals of whiteness as divine and darker skin as evil. By synthesizing these broader motifs into a piece that seems to reach outward with its curling pieces and a serious face that stares back at you, Cherry continues to weave together strings that connect the ideas of the past and present to those of the future.
Schroeder Cherry, Angel Sconce #11, Red Wings, 2024, mixed media on wood.
Through these works, Cherry takes the history of a harmful stereotype into his hands and melds it into a poetic emblem of joy for the African diaspora. These symbols contribute to the building of a foundation for the narratives that Cherry threads the needle for but never ties off the stitch.
Open Ended Narratives from February 18th to April 5th, 2025, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by James Cho
As visitors enter the STAMP Gallery to look at Shroeder Cherry’s work, they are greeted by two pieces, one of which being Cute to Criminal (2023) which is part of Cherry’s Future Voter Series. Like much of Cherry’s work on display for the Open Ended Narratives exhibit, Cute to Criminal presents commentary about the ways in which African Americans are mistreated and profiled by law enforcement.
There are many aspects of Cute to Criminal that could be analysed, from the predominant locks and keys, the playing cards, the watermelon slices, the shards of glass, and so on. When I first saw this piece, though, the first things that stood out were: the portrait of a young black boy; the washboard and the small metal bars at the top of it; the sign language that spells out “Cute”; and the grandfather clock pendulum at the bottom of the piece. Why? Because all of those factors work to present the dualism that Cherry expresses about how African American boys are perceived by law enforcement not as future voters, but as future criminals.
Shroeder Cherry, Future Voter Series, Cute to Criminal, 2023. Mixed media on wood; 47 x 17 inches. Photo Credit: Júlia Sodré
How do these elements work to answer Cherry’s question posed in Cute to Criminal, being: “At what age do I go from cute to criminal?” Cherry’s use of the grandfather clock pendulum represents the ticking of time until black children, especially young boys, are profiled and attacked by police officers as if they were adult men, resulting in them getting shot by bullets akin to the ones lodged in the portrait frame of the young boy. The bars at the top of the washboard work to that same effect, resembling prison cell bars where boys like the one in the portrait might end up behind simply for the colour of their skin and gender. All while they toil away in low-wage jobs that have historically served white people in the United States. Thus, the answer to Cherry’s question is that it doesn’t take long at all for black boys to “go from cute to criminal” in the eyes of the law.
This issue, then, speaks to the second piece from Cherry’s Future Voter Series that drew me in, being Aspects of Future Voters #33 Test (2023). If young black men are considered criminals in the eyes of the law, the law will and has always worked against African American suffrage to prevent “criminals” from having a voice. In Voters #33 Test, Cherry provides two excerpts about voter “literacy tests and other methods [that] were designed for single purpose: to stop Black Americans from voting.” Tests that weren’t rendered unconstitutional until 1965, since they were considered justified due to the historical profiling of African Americans as criminals starting from a young age. This crooked bending of the legal system’s rules, represented by the zig-zagged rulers in Voters #33 Test, was just one of many ways that the government worked to block any and all future African American voters.
Shroeder Cherry, Aspects of Future Voters #33 Test, 2023. Mixed media on wood; 31 x 24 inches. Photo Credit: Júlia Sodré
One other rule that bent the law that Cherry represents in both Cute to Criminal and Voters #33 Test is the “Grandfather clause” that was passed in Southern states after the Civil War. It is one of the “other methods” mentioned in Voters #33 Test and given physical form in Cute to Criminal through its grandfather clock pendulum. Namely, the clause prevented all future African American voters from voting by saying that only “those who had enjoyed the right to vote prior to 1866 or 1867, and their lineal descendants, would be exempt” from literacy tests and other “educational, property or tax requirements for voting”, systematically targeting recently freed slaves who were not exempt (Britannica n.d). The clause and literacy tests worked to stop African Americans from using the key to attaining equality: the freedom to freely think and vote for representatives.
Why does this still matter today? In the wake of recent attacks on DEI initiatives, mass government layoffs, and hostility towards any non-white individuals, we are still living in a world where our rights are infringed upon. The Voting Rights Act that was passed in August of 1965, just barely under sixty years ago, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that acts as the foundation of DEI sixty-one years ago (they aren’t even old enough to count for the full retirement age!), are in jeopardy. What Shroder Cherry purports about discrimination against African Americans and by extension other racial/ethnic/gender-based rights is something that we should be wary of in the coming years because we might face the loss of these pieces of landmark legislation in the near future.
Open Ended Narratives: Mixed Media Assemblages on Wood by Schroeder Cherryfrom February 18 to April 5, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Olivia DiJulio
To start, could you tell me a bit about yourself and your background?
I grew up in Washington, D.C, and I’ve always been an arts kid. When I was a child, I played with blocks, very colorful wooden blocks. I also played with puppets. I received puppets as presents when I was very young in elementary school. In fact, I still have a puppet, I have a string marionette. I started off with hand puppets and then later I got into marionettes by third grade and fourth grade. I stopped playing with puppets when I was in junior high school because it just wasn’t a cool thing to do for high school kids. In college, I started working with puppets again and I like them. Someone introduced me to a puppet master in Chicago and I ended up apprenticing with him for a while.
When I was in school in D.C. I had the fortune of being exposed to university students from Howard University and they had put together a program called Workshops For Careers in the Arts. Although I was a visual artist, I hung out with the theater kids. I learned a lot from the theater kids, like the importance of rehearsals and preparation, but I knew I wasn’t one of them. I still apply those lessons today as a museum educator and also as an artist.
Do you have any experiences that have influenced your creative process?
I actually finished high school in Switzerland. I was an exchange student, and in my senior year I was taking art classes in Switzerland. I went to the Münchenstein high school, Gymnasium Münchenstein. I was exposed to how the Swiss went about doing their artwork, and that was much more regimented and formulaic, but in America it’s much more wide open. I really enjoy traveling and being lost in different cultures finding my way. There was a period where I would almost annually go to a different country just to immerse myself in another culture. How do you go about making your art when you’re exploring unfamiliar territory? All of that feeds into the art practice. Creativity is all about trying something different, something new, and I try to remind myself of that in the process.
Given the title of the exhibit, “Open Ended Narratives:” what draws you to create nonlinear stories for your work?
I’ll start off by sharing a proverb that I came across. It’s an Islamic phrase and it goes: Allah delights in truth, and varying degrees of truth, but even Allah does not like the entire truth. When I first read that, I had to meditate on it for a while. I realized, wow, this means that there is never one story. You know, Allah likes all truth, but never the absolute truth. There’s never one absolute truth.
With my works, although I might have a narrative in mind, what I appreciate is the visitor being able to look at the work and come up with their own narrative. Sometimes I try to eavesdrop in a gallery to hear what people are saying before I identify myself as the artist. When I come to actually hear what they’re saying, I get that unfiltered response. I would say one of the things I would like people to do is to take time with the work and to look at it. I don’t really expect people to love everything. That’s not my interest. What I really am more interested in is having them just be engaged with the work and come away with something.
That actually leads into our next point. I often hear this question of “can we separate the art from the artist?” What is your stance on art being inherently political, or art for the sake of art?
Now, I have to say, I had an experience recently in a gallery. It was about political movements and how people resist certain movements. There was this one person and she came to my work, looked at it for like a split second, saw some writing and said, “oh, propaganda.”Now, the piece itself was called Huddle, and it’s actually in the gallery right now. It’s of three teenage boys, they’re standing together and they’re on their phones and they’re communicating with each other. The text says “How Republican States Are Expanding Their Power Over Elections” so it would actually be talking about the political movement and what Republicans were doing. It wasn’t propaganda, it was news.
Schroeder Cherry, Future Voters #20, Huddle, 2022. Mixed Media on wood, 36 x 28.5 in.
The viewer brings their own baggage to the work. You can’t disengage from your own experiences when you’re looking at the work. Whatever their experiences are, they’re going to bring that to the piece. It’s always inherently political, because when an artist decides what they’re going to do, that’s an intention. It may or may not be political, but what they’re going through mentally can easily be either political or not.
The next question I want to address is, as a mixed-media artist, how do you decide on a medium? Is there a particular reason why you’re drawn to them?
The mixed media for me is something that evolved. I was trained as a painter so I painted on canvas, I drew on paper. But I got to a point where I was abusing the canvas. I realized I needed something that had a stronger foundation because then I was attaching objects. So I went to wood, but I didn’t go to wood as a sculptor. I went to wood as a painter who just wanted to work on a flat surface. As I jumped over to these flat panels, I moved into carving and using power tools to shape the edges. I didn’t want to create pieces with straight edges on all sides. That led me wanting to experiment with the texture inside the composition. I got more power tools, I got some burners, and then later I got jigsaws and other saws that allowed me to gouge into the piece.
How do you go about including the motifs and imagery we see in your work?
There are some things that repeatedly appear in my works and they include, keys, watermelons, playing cards and there may even be glass shards. The keys for me represent tools of access. Everybody I know has got at least one key that they’ve had for more than a year and don’t know what it belongs to. But they don’t want to give this key up. You can either close something up or you can open it up if you have the key, and the same thing goes with locks.
Watermelons for me, I’m reclaiming a negative, racist image as a positive one. First of all, I’m a vegetarian. I like watermelon. When I first moved to Baltimore in spring, it was the rainy season and there was a bumper crop of watermelons. I started eating melons every day, even for breakfast with a croissant. This is a very nutritious fruit and it has been maligned. I learned that historically, watermelons originated in continental Africa. You’ve got these different melons of different colors. In Maryland you have what you call sugar babies, and those melons are yellow on the inside. There’s a great variety of melons and even the seeds are beautiful. Doing a deep dive into the visual of the watermelon, I thought this is something really to work with and we need to pay attention to it.
I want to highlight again your puppeteering experience. That seems really important to you. What is it like as a role of a puppeteer when communicating information through that medium?
First and foremost, it’s a performance for the audience. No matter what shape the puppet is it could be anything. It could be a book. It could be a stone, but the purpose is its movement in the narrative. I’m doing two things when I’m working with puppetry. I am a visual artist because I’m sewing and constructing them, and I’m a performer because I’m manipulating them in a show. All puppeteers are hybrid artists. When you get a group of puppeteers together, they’ll start talking about their materials and their performances. That’s what they do, it’s about how you make it and how you perform it.
Do you have any stories of performing for older audiences? I feel like puppeteering usually gets associated with children.
Yeah, there’s a puppet. Her name is Ms. Lily, and she’s actually a puppet docent. I designed her when I was working at the Baltimore Museum of Art years ago and I wanted to create a safe place for adults to play. She’s got this white knit sweater, a red skirt, and black patent leather shoes. She became very, very popular because the adults knew that they could come play. She starts in the beginning and says “This is an adult tour. It’s not for children, if you have a child, please take them to the next room. There’s a workshop there, which is lovely for children, but this is not a tour for children.” That’s how she started the tour and then she would introduce me as her technician. I’m dressed in all black, so I’m fully visible. But she introduces me as her technician and she lets the audience know that if there are any questions, they are to be directed to her and not to the technician because the technician will not be speaking.
Ms. Lily, Puppet Art Docent, at Wits End Puppet Slam, Takoma Park, MD
Occasionally in Baltimore, we have what we call puppet slams. It’s when a group of puppeteers come together, usually anywhere from six to ten puppeteers or companies will come together and we’ll each have about five to eight minutes on stage. Sometimes those performances are more for adults than they are for children.
I think that is an amazing form of visual and performance art. Thank you for sharing your puppeteering and your mixed media processes. To wrap up our conservation, 10 years from now, where do you think you see yourself in your art?
I would say I hope to still be creating because I’m going to be one of those people who’s still creating when I’m 95, so I want to continue to do that. I would hope that I’m in a place where people are aware of my work and are enjoying it.
Thank you to Dr. Schroder Cherry for this interview, from the Stamp Gallery.
Schroeder Cherry’s work is included in Open Ended Narratives: at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from February 18 to April 5, 2025. For more information on Schroeder Cherry’s work, visit https://bakerartist.org/portfolios/schroedercherry. For more information on Open Ended Narratives: and related events, visit https://stamp.umd.edu/centers/stamp_gallery.
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.
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.
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 Ellen Zhang
We Live in The Sky is an exhibition that combines diverse voices on what home means to individuals. From Tori Ellison’s use of UMD writing students’ phrases about home to Mami Takahashi’s experience as a woman away from her Tokyo home, both artists explore belonging and identity. How Takahashi’s piece “Cage Mentality” expresses belonging, or the lack thereof, particularly struck me.
Cage Mentality (2015) is a documentation of Takahashi’s one-hour-long performance, consisting of her building an enclosure of woven strings around herself. Starting with horizontal lines, Takahashi builds a layer of strings inches away from herself. With limited body movement, the artist closes the gaps of the horizontal strings by weaving, knotting, and crossing vertical lines. She does this until her entire body is hidden within the strings. When reflecting on the process, Takahashi states, “In this uncomfortable situation where my body constantly touched lines, I had to force my arms to stretch more than necessary to continue to create a cage-like space”.
Mami Takahashi, Cage Mentality, 2015, documentation of performance, single-channel video, 03:00 min.
In this way, the discomfort is self-inflicting, which makes the viewer question why Takahashi is doing this. Despite the uncomfortable process, she finds “the lure of isolation and its pain”. This represents how finding a “home” in a foreign environment is complex as navigating personal identity while facing social pressures can lead to isolation. While seclusion is painful, it can be enticing because it offers refuge from external forces such as adapting to a new language, traditions, and more. However, rejecting pressures to conform isn’t exactly liberating. The fear of losing one’s identity contrasts with the desire to fit in, resulting in internal turmoil. Social connection is a basic human need and, unfortunately, many immigrants feel pressured to sacrifice elements of their identity to satisfy it. In Cage Mentality, the social connection disappears as the barrier between the individual and the outside world becomes starker.
So what does Cage Mentality say about home? We typically associate the term “home” with comfort. However, Takahashi challenges this idea by reflecting on the complexities of finding this source of solace. The quest for home includes mental turmoil and can lead to painful isolation. At the same time, solitude can provide a sense of security, allowing individuals to remove themselves from the pressures of a foreign environment.
Takahashi’s work is included in We Live in The Sky 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/.
For more information on We Live in The Sky and related events, visit stamp.umd.edu/centers/stamp_gallery.
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