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Current Exhibition

Shelter and Language in Tori Ellison’s Sky Writing

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

What is a home? Is it a shelter? A place where we are safe? Our families and friends? What happens when one becomes adrift, and in need of a new home? These are the questions that Sky Writing asks visitors when they enter the Gallery. Comprised of six panels draped from the ceiling along the Gallery’s window display, visitors can walk through the array of panels that each contain different prints inspired by submissions from international students attending UMD as well as Tori Ellison’s artwork, in collaboration UMD MFA Candidate Varvara Tokareva.

The first and third panels display a bird species called Swifts who spend much of their time in the air, migrating from place to place as they continuously seek new shelters. Complimenting this, the back side of the panel contains 7,139 words for “shelter” in spoken languages, and 293 in written languages from across the world. Together, they represent immigrants in the historical narrative of the US wherein those seeking a new home, shelter, and economic stability come to the States as “birds of passage” much like the airborne Swifts on the panels. A narrative that has always fluctuated, and one that in light of recent years become more prominent, making spaces like our University where many immigrants or second-generation can find and take shelter a lifeline for many, where they can freely express their languages and cultures.

Specifically, Natalie Molina highlights how immigrants in the US have very often been treated as these “birds of passage” – brazos fuertes – who since the 1910s come from overseas or land to get a job, before being sent back to their home countries only to repeat the cycle over again (Molina 163). The unity in the languages included on the panels thus acts as a cry against being a swift or bird species that is in a constant state of placelessness. They represent the desire to find a home, a shelter, the desire held by international students like those who contributed to Sky Writing to have stability and define their own identities beyond the label of ‘immigrant’. 

Tori Ellison, Sky Writing, 2024. Screenprinting, paper, paint and wood, 8 1/2 x 36 in each.

But what does “home” mean for international students attending UMD? The second and fourth panels are based on contributions from UMD students and College Park community members who provide answers to that inquiry. Three phrases are displayed on the second panel as answers to Ellison’s question. The consensus was that “home” could be anything from a house, a sense of belonging, a neighbourhood community, and oftentimes chosen family. The fourth panel is a few short statements written in Japanese by a student attending UMD, who highlights similar views about how home is a place of safety, and how irreplaceable it is to them since to have a home is to be whole. 

Having lived outside of the US for much of my childhood, viewing other students’ responses in Sky Writing, particularly the back of the first and the front of the second panel hit home for me. I grew up mainly in Singapore (among other countries), and looking through Ellison’s piece felt both nostalgic and uplifting. Going to an international school where children would often only stay for a year before leaving through elementary and middle school, I got to interact with so many people from very different backgrounds, especially at school festivals, while also experiencing the “bird of passage” loss when friends would move away. Seeing the unity in the hundreds of words for “shelter”, as well as how other students like myself valued the need to have a sense of belonging, stability, and oftentimes chosen family due to the nature of moving to new places so regularly, was reassuring and validating. It also pressed the importance of places like the University, where immigrants can feel safe and find communities on campus at places like MICA, the multicultural centre, and the vast amount of student unions or organisations for Latine, Asian and Pacific Islanders that celebrate their identities as a home-like place. 

This, combined with Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet 94” on the fifth panel, and Varvara Tokareva’s print on the sixth panel, again answers the question that Ellison puts forward about what home means to us. That the lack of a shelter, a home to return to in order to find comfort, whether that home is a place or a person, creates a sense of exile, isolation, and colourlessness. Together, all six panels in Sky Writing highlight the necessity of a home that pervades every other artwork in We Live in the Sky since each panel highlights how UMD students and College Park residents value home and how it defines their identity, and how the disruption or displacement of their home destroys their sense of self and belonging, because without a home to shelter in they would be just like a swoop of swifts coasting through the skies. 

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 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. 

Contemporary Art Purchasing Program (CAPP), Opening Reception

Installation Revelation

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Perception in Motion

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One of my absolute favorite pastimes is people-watching. That may sound creepy; yet, it’s something that never becomes boring, since no two people will look or act exactly the same. When I people-watch, I feel as if I’m a receiver of information rather than a creator. To put it simply, I enjoy people-watching because it can be an entertaining, passive kind of activity.

At the same time, there have been days when I chose to add a new aspect to my people-watching game. I was recently sitting on a bench at Dupont Circle in D.C. with a friend, and we decided to pick a passerby at random and “invent” a life for him or her. It’s astonishing when I think about the number of attributions we were able to come up with, based exclusively on our first impression of this stranger.

Since “Looking Black At Me” has been in show, I’ve been thinking about the difference between simply observing a person versus actively making assumptions about them. I think that there is a very fine line separating the two things, and this line falls in different places for different people. In my own experiences, I’ve found that it’s sometimes hard to even be aware of crossing the line. It just seems to be a natural human inclination to attach a personality and a characterization to an unknown face.

When I stand in front of the monitors in the gallery and (seemingly) make eye contact with the people in the video, I challenge myself to ignore the impulse to characterize them right off the bat. I particularly like the notion that the person in the screen is essentially looking right back at the viewer, but without making any sort of judgment. It really gets me thinking about the give-and-return that comes with making judgments.

Even when I feel positive that I’m not characterizing someone on first sight, it sometimes happens subconsciously. I think this is why it’s so easy to develop an impression of someone and then stick with it. Something that I’ve taken away from Larry Cook’s work is the idea that perception can be considered fluid. Larry’s exhibit has reminded me that our immediate characterization of someone isn’t set in stone by any means. When visitors come to this show, I like to think that they walk away with the awareness that perception is changeable.

Carmen