Instead of opening this article with a mildly witty and mostly stale quip about April showers and May flowers, I’ll just cut right to the chase: the senior art theses rocked. Nary a coed should fret about meteorology and horticulture when the Wesleyan student campus is blooming with such phenomenal artistic talent.
April 25 through April 30 marked the last week of Senior Thesis Exhibits in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. The exhibit featured the work of Emily A. Chandler, Eugene Dizenko, Robert P. Harris, Robert Leitzell, Rebecca Meredith, Michael Shamoon, and Madeline A. Shapiro.
Uniform only in its level of innovation, the exhibit lends new meaning to the word “eclectic.” Actually, it reinstates its old definition (instead of a Henry Bacon building-cum-hedonistic temple for the tragically hip): deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources.
Myriad in form, medium, concept, and milieu, the theses seemed to be of the same attitudinal ilk. Each of the theses explores a language used to record the trajectory of human life. Together, the theses evoke the feeling of looking at an empty ant farm: one cannot see the ants or their activities, but the paths they’ve taken, the empty spaces where life has been, the imprint they’ve made.
Eugene Dizenko’s black and white photos are glimpses into the urban landscape. They convey a synergy between, not man and the land, but man and the city. His photos capture the results: the building, the progress, the ruin, and the refuse. Madeline A. Shapiro’s collection of illustrations, titled “Mumbai in the Rainy Season,” logs a period of time, not in hours or days, but bicycles and umbrellas.
Robert P. Harris’ design of an international airport, entitled “Airport: How To,” endeavors to invent a form of communication available to every human being. Michael Shamoon’s graphic stills and video game display measures humanity’s stake in the digital world.
Rebecca Meredith’s “Prints,” a series of formal drawings, explores the human body, and the tracks made by living things. Robert Leitzell’s oblique installation, “Attitudes of Motion,” displays the organ of celluloid as, simultaneously, an instrument of creation and an instrument of decay.
Emily Chandler’s fascinating installation, “Cycle,” gauges the passage of life in what is spent. Her exhibit included several parts: a pile of crumpled and discarded pieces of paper covered in tallies (“then”), and a mound of masticated gum (“while”).
“[My thesis] was about the relationship between time and work and the space that becomes filled as the work accumulates,” Chandler said. “It was also about the way that work transforms time with a process—for example, the flipbooks [of a clothes dryer in cycle] each documented three seconds of real-time but [all] took more than one hundred hours to complete.”
A deftly intriguing artistic thesis, Chandler’s was a highlight of the exhibit.
That is not to say that any of the theses paled in comparison. What Zilkha offered was a smattering of the talent that is rampant on this campus. As humans barrel through the atmosphere, attempting communication and connection, art might be the only thing that can trace our orbit, saying where we’ve been and what we’ve done. That is what may be gleaned from the last week of Senior Thesis Exhibits. Unfortunately, the theses are no longer available for viewing in the gallery, but contact the curator, Nina Felkin, with questions about alternative access to student works.
Leave a Reply