Photography is used as a function to advocate societies contemporary models of beauty. This supposedly realistic medium allows the portrayal of “perfect” beings in extensively viewed magazines and billboards. Because this breed of images are continuously reproduced, the public is lead to believe they should change in order to become visually appealing. I aim to use photography for a different purpose. Rather than present the ideally attractive, I want to demonstrate that beauty is created by the institution. This project illustrates the places that thrive on altering physical appearance and cater to human insecurity. Whether as trivial as a barbershop, or as extreme as a plastic surgery, we are constantly feeding into the modification market.

BOGUS PAPER is an experiment in extending the medium of collage. The term “bogus” is used to describe an object or event, which is in some way imitative of false. Through utilizing the implicit texture of the printed image, I have found that I can effectively simulate the construction of a fictional (although familiar) object, i.e. a piece of plywood covered with bubble wrap. Similarly, through applying the collage process to handmade three-dimensional structures, I have found that I am able to further confuse this work’s relationship to “the found” versus “the art” object.

*On its website, the company describes itself as “the leading distributor of shipping, industrial and packaging materials to businesses throughout North America”.

I find dance to be an overwhelmingly personal, spiritual, and meditative art form. It can be an incredible outlet for individual expression granting the mind and body freedom in perhaps its most essential state. Yet simultaneously, dance as it exists in today’s society can be surprisingly oppressive. The most obvious example of this lies in the drill team or cheerleading dance aesthetic where individual expression is nearly forbidden. The image of the group must be upheld at all costs and is done so through a very strict and limited movement vocabulary. Here we start to see how contradictory dance can be; it is introspective yet communicative, both thoughtful and performative.

My project is meant to explore the complicated and often contrary place of dance in the modern world. I chose to use American and North Korean culture as a platform for this discussion. Both the United States and North Korea are obsessively devoted to pop culture icons. While this devotion is both theatrical and over-the-top, it is often extremely serious and even religious. The love for their respective deities exists in the same confusing place that dance lives in: intensely personal and oddly performative. This is evidenced in the footage of the North Koreans mourning the death of Kim Il-sung and in video of American mourners grieving the death of Michael Jackson. In both cases there is truth and reality in their emotions and yet I can't help but also see a performative quality or affectedness in their grief.

Americans and North Koreans also share a veneration for those who are able to move well and with dexterity. In my project the American example of this idea is featured in clips of Michael Jackson. The "King of Pop" was recognized at a young age for his amazing ability to dance and eventually became famous for such moves as the "moon walk" and the "robot." North Koreans also share a respect for skillful dancers as seen in the epic dance and gymnastic spectacles that make up their Mass Games. Thousands of young North Korean children train and rehearse for months in order to perfect the movements. All of this training is done in order to please the Great Leader (Kim Il-sung) and prove true loyalty to communism. In both instances the body acts as a signifier though in decidedly different contexts. The transmission of meaning through dance and the body is partially contingent on these contexts and when juxtaposed an intriguing tension is built.

In terms of movement specifically it’s interesting how dance can in some ways define us as humans and our ability to move fluidly, making quick personal choices through improvisation while in other ways it can strip us of our individualism through the generalizing aesthetic of popular culture. There is certainly an undeniable power to bodies moving in unison, but at times it seems this power is exploited. Movements within this context begin to appear militaristic. We see this most literally in the North Korean footage of their Mass Games, where performers are often dressed as soldiers, but it’s also apparent in American cheerleading routines as well. Individual bodies become lost to a greater image, a larger machine.

This tension between the individual expressive self and the massive group dynamic demonstrated within the dance aesthetic is reflected in the installation of my project. Each of the videos were made independently to exist on their own but when played side by side on several monitors the intent is to unlock meanings and call attention to images through comparison and juxtaposition. In the same way that several bodies moving together convey different messages than a single dancer might express so too are the videos meant to indicate other connotations through simultaneous play.

Both film-making and dance serve a self-reflective purpose in my life. DANCE UNTIL YOU DIE is meant to show the mirror-like qualities both art forms have to me as well as to our society as a whole.

Rachael Williams

April 2011

Bobby knows nothing about Brenda, he asks her where she is from, and she responds “Wisconsin”, a place she had to leave due to the death of her last boyfriend. Much of the information given about the characters is vague or false. Most of what Brenda says is part of her cover story. She pushes Bobby around, manipulating him into inviting her to the dance, so she can lure him back to her house for her 16th birthday cake. Brenda has chosen Bobby as the boy she will spend the rest of her demon life with, living happily together back in her dream world.

However, not everything goes according to Brenda’s plan. on the night of Brenda’s 16th birthday, just before Bobby is hers forever, Bobby manages to snap out of Brenda’s spell. He takes the cake knife and cuts off Brenda’s head. He head lands in the cake, where it lives on, singing “It’s my Party (and I’ll die if I Want to)”, while her body chases Bobby through an alternate dimension. Brenda’s body stabs Bobby, and continues to dance along to Brenda’s head’s tune. She doesn’t go down too easily.

Dream Lover is a video made by, and starring, me, Melissa Wynne. This piece is a personal exploration of the American Dream as it exists today in a YouTube world. Throughout the making of this movie, I jokingly told myself, “I’m gonna make me a star”. Brenda is a character who lives a life that I do not, and cannot. She looks like me, but lives without boundaries. She can seduce a boy with the flip of her hair, she sings like a siren, and has a license to kill. She goes from saccharine sweet to sour in an instant, and offers no apologies. I use Brenda as a venue to be a star. Brenda is a character that lives out my fantasies on screen. I consider stars like Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, who found fame by posting videos of themselves on YouTube. The idea that you can become famous by making yourself into some marketable character, and putting it on the internet, is incredibly fascinating. I don’t think of YouTube as the exclusive venue for my project, but know that parts of it are going to end up there. YouTube allows for a kind of unsurpassed self-indulgence. 12 year-old girls and 45 year-old men alike are posting video diaries about the most mundane bullshit imaginable, staring at themselves in the computer screen as they do it. I basically allowed myself to indulge in all of my worldly pleasures; mixing my love of 60’s pop music and 80’s slasher films, as well as fashion and glamor. I played the role of a high school sweet heart, a lead singer in a 60’s girl group, and last but most definitely not least, a bad ass demon bitch. Brenda is a survivor, and even though she loses her head in the final scene, she lives on. After all, I’m too pretty to die.

Of all the old things I collect, my collection of 16mm film prints are by far the most precious to me. I have been collecting them since the age of fifteen. From newsreels to cartoons; to features, travelogues, and home movies—I have a varied, self-facilitated archive of over fifty films dating from the 1920’s to the 1970’s. My Senior Project, The Art of Mugging, started with this archive.

I had no qualms about using the footage from my collection. A lot of it was in extremely poor condition when I received it—among the worst affected were the home movies. The footage I used for The Art of Mugging was riddled with torn sprocket holes and faulty splices; and was slowly warping due to Vinegar Syndrome—a virus that attacks the chemical compounds in film stock. I wanted to do something with the footage before it became completely unwatchable. I was saddened by the prospect of losing them.

Home movies are extremely fun to watch. Even though I had no idea who made these movies or who appeared in them, I got hours of enjoyment watching the unnamed figures mug for the camera. I was the most attracted to these funny, loving, and sometimes awkward moments. Something so wonderful and weird happens in home movies. The amateur-filmmaker films what they find interesting. The result often comes out like a moving portrait.

Isolating these precious, portrait-like shots within the home movies in my collection, I set out to create something simple and beautiful. Inspired by the duration and style of the earliest moving pictures—which like home movies, were often experimental and documentary in their subject matter—I created sixteen, 16mm portraits.

The movies that comprise The Art of Mugging, are not only movies—they are paintings, collages, artifacts, and oddities. Film is beautiful to me because of its physicality. I left in imperfections, like scratches, lint, and dirt which age the film nicely. Manipulating each scene, frame-by-frame, by slathering a cocktail of fast-drying top coat, ink, bleach, toluene, and finger print grease, each film becomes twenty-four paintings per second. All of these alterations made the film strip itself even more physical and wonderful to touch. Each movie was optically printed and digitally edited, allowing me even more ways to add my love to films that were originally made with so much love.

Each movie in The Art of Mugging was designed to work as a standalone piece within a larger collection. I wanted to start a project that I could keep adding to. I also liked the idea of having a collection of little movies that viewers could watch (and re-watch) in a variety of different orders. Most of all, I wanted to make pieces that were delightful for the sake of being delightful. But, delightful and fun as they may be, they also bring up other deeper feelings and thoughts on love, sentimentality, relationships, domesticity, and even death.

The films contained within The Art of Mugging are little oddities that exist within a particular moment in time where they will forever remain to bring comfort and a smile for those who watch them.

It isn't physically possible for me to have a child. I'm gay. I don't want to have children. I don't think I will ever be able to financially support a child the way it deserves to be taken care of. My mother is dead. We have a history of mental illness in my family. I have bad genes. I don't think I would make a good mother; I'm too selfish. I'm the oldest living woman in my family. Who do I look to for advice?

Motherhood, pregnancy, and birth function together as major points of female experience, for some. Experiencing a connection to a life inside of you, be it fleeting or sustained can profoundly affect an individual in seemingly inexpressible ways. For some women senses and internal rhythms fall into place, creating bodily harmonies they never could have conceived of. Others find themselves at war, struggling to stay on an even keel, confronted constantly with new sensitivities and obstacles. Some even pass through a great deal of it relatively unscathed and unchanged, but most experience at one point or another all of these expressions of pregnancy. In the first trimester, the connection between mother and child seems almost hallucinatory, with the woman conjuring feelings for a fetus just starting to gestate, mentally forging a state of maternity out of the knowledge of this truth about her body.

The symptoms that tip a woman off to the truth about her body, the cessation of her period/an overly long period, bloating, changes in her breasts, fatigue, and nausea, are all symptoms that can also express themselves in hysterical pregnancies as well. Hysterical pregnancy is the manifestation in a woman of a belief that she is pregnant accompanied by the symptoms of pregnancy, but the woman does not have an actual fetus inside of her. Some very rare cases persist all the way through the nine months culminating in a hysterical birth. It is possible for these women to experience a first trimester the same way women who are actually pregnant do, even forming the early bond of maternity with their imaginary child.

My desire not to have children, does to preclude me from wanting to explore the female experiences of motherhood, pregnancy, and birth. The desire to explore maternity, searching for how it might change me, open me up to seeing in new ways, and finding a way to express the meaning I hoped to find within it, pushed me to seek access through the blurring of truth and delusion in the first trimester. I set out on a nine month performance of non-biological pregnancy hoping ti would help me shape my own connection with maternity. Following in the footsteps of hysterical pregnancy, I was pregnant for nine months. I lived healthily, worried about our future and stability, informed my family and friends, took care of myself, walked slowly and with great deliberation on icy days, experienced total 180 mood swings, and thought a lot about the future and the past. At the same time, I couldn't pee positive, didn't look pregnant without a false belly on to anyone but myself, kept getting my period erratically, didn't experience quickening until much later than it should have come, lost confidence in myself, and struggled with the dichotomy I experienced between my body and my mind.

I found myself drawn to the friction between analog and digital video technologies over the nine months. Something in the frenetic glitches I was making within unstable analog to digital conversions reminded me of how my pregnancy was being shaped by the clash of my mental and physical states. I amassed children's videos and instructional pregnancy VHS ranging from pregnancy massage to preparing your car safely for your upcoming newborn, along with home movies of my childhood and my mother's pregnancy with my sister, while shooting my own home videos as well, with the help of my friends.

My video installation, Maternity, springs from and serves as a reconstitution of the nine month performance, the play and experimentation with creating glitches through degradation and manipulation between analog and digital systems, and the amassing of media and images that were part of the conception of maternity I was forging in myself.

“Portiragnes” is a portrait of a small working-class town in the south of France where I spent a month every summer for fifteen years. It was shot over the summer and winter, 2010-11.

“North South” is a travel log of a two-month cross-country trip I took in the summer of 2009.

For my project, I made an installation that is a construction of a house-- a fictional house in which a fictional family resides. There are four elements that I employed in the piece: photography, sculpture, video, and sound. The photos serve to portray the family that lives in the house, remnants of them, glimpses into their life so you get a sense of character, despite their absence. These photos are meant to allude to the role of photography in a domestic “non-art” space by charging the space with emotional content. The sculptural element is to give a sense of space, and to introduce familiar household architecture. Video's will be employed to give glimpses of reality: eggs cooking, a fire burning--elements of home life that can only be experienced through the use of time. The audio component will be installed but hidden speakers throughout the "house" that have familiar house sounds, dishes being washed, music being listened to from a room upstairs, etc. All four of these elements serve to transform the space that the viewer enters, in hopes of reminding them of their families, and their houses and homes as compared to the archetype I have constructed.

63 Mulberry Way is an entire fictional address; it is a house that resides on no particular street in no particular town, because it is on every street in every town. As I embark upon my “adult” life upon graduation, constructing my own home is an issue more pertinent than ever. This installation is a culmination of everything I’ve learned from my family, from TV, and from the world around my about how a happy home is to be constructed…a failed attempt some might say.

Artist’s Statement

Senior Project Title: Look/See

April 27th, 2011

When on my way to sleep early in my life, I would stare at the white ceiling above my bed and pick out faces created from the creases in the paint. After many nights of staring I developed a habit of seeing the same faces over and over again. It became hard to see anything new in the ceiling, the forms traced in my mind were less free and more automatic; there, again, was profile of the same man with the long nose and extended brow as the night before etc. When attempting to alter the familiar faces I was dissatisfied with my new creations and quickly disregarded them for what now seemed like the instinctual forms. These faces were so obvious to me that I even found it odd when no one else could see what I was talking about in pointing out the faces. This same sort of looking game is played frequently with clouds. People seem to naturally create associations from abstract forms found in everyday life, and this seeing process is subjective and behaves differently in everyone’s mind. This sort of gaze is similar to the way in which a viewer first confronts an abstract work of art. The initial sight is like a choice of what the mind will make of the piece, and only further observation can alter this primary sentiment. The pieces in the collection “Look/See” are intended to serve foremost as objects of free association and meditation. No references within the work are directly intended, the mind is left free to categorize and think. The way I have manipulated the surface with paint and fabric should trap the eye within the painting.

On a material level, over the past year I have been working on my way of relating to art making. I wanted to develop a new form of mark making and remove evidence of my hand more from the final pieces. I accomplished this by using sewing to create line and using fabric to create planes of color and texture. Subtle shifts in color have become much more important to me, so I sewed large pieces of color on the back of the of some of the paintings as a substitute for washes. My interest in fabric stemmed from its complicated history and beauty as a material on and off the canvas.

It is not difficult for me to imagine that everyone sees something different when looking at a piece of abstract art. In this way the works exists on two planes; the piece has a physical existence in the world and metaphysical existence (an emotional reaction) in the brain. For me the work symbolizes this process in two steps; the first glance one recognizes the piece as an abstract painting, and in the second closer glance, one sees that some of the paint is actually fabric, and the illusion is undone. In this way the pieces hopefully trip up that instinct reaction in order to gain a deeper level of insight from one’s own eye in the painting.

There is a difference between looking and seeing. One either sees and understands the intention of the artist, sees it for what it is on its own, or disregards it, looking but seeing nothing and probably walking away. Art often exists in the world and as a debate in our minds. Sometimes art is instinctually appreciated at first glance and sometimes it grows into liking. I hope I have created work that people find accessible, relatable, and worthy of contemplation, and I hope others may find something of themselves in the work.

I will demonstrate my work with singers, movies, trios, and large ensembles. I am young and would be be disillusioned with my studies if i claimed to have a complete and confident artist's statement. These four years have aced as a time to gain the tools and skills necessary shape a clear and useful artist's statement during the years to come.

It is my goal to work with as many people as possible. Music is (for the most part) a social activity; practicing musicians play with other practicing musicians. It is easy to be isolated when living the lifestyle of an artist. Often, art is confined to a complete and cut off head world. While this is certainly an important aspect of creating, it is only one half of the whole. The other half is the social side of creating. This social side of creating is important for me. It is often other people that create excitement and energy for me. My senior project (particularly this last concert) has enabled me to create a balance between isolation and inclusion. I isolate myself in anticipation of including others.

This last concert demonstrates my commitment to collaboration. In preparation for this concert I worked with singers, dancers, sculptors, film makers, actors, performance artists, and many varieties of musicians.

Producing the film almost entirely by myself, with little to no budget, my goal was to make the piece seem as internal as possible—setting my characters against empty backgrounds, and remaining close where another film maker might have used a wider, more expansive shot. Though the film was about the relation of the characters to the space, the internal nature of the decisions being made led me to the aesthetic choice to keep the shots closer in. There are wider establishing shots used to convey the isolation of the main character, but these are almost exclusively used in the present tense sections where the character is reflecting on his past. This coupled with the use of warmer colors during the flashbacks juxtaposed with cooler colors during the present tense scenes leads the viewer to understand the warmth that Colin is leaving behind, as it becomes more apparent to him as he leaves the only home he’s known.