The Friction of Recognition

Life began for me at a point different from where it began for the visitor in front of me. The work started at yet another point for someone arriving later than I did. The footage may have already begun again for some early arrivals to the exhibition. That evening, Life (2017) began again for all of us, probably more than once. Drew Bacon’s most recent animation started for viewers as it was constantly refreshed and reinvigorated through the sporadic recognition of his images. When I first witnessed Bacon’s Life, I thought the footage ran continuously forward, taking new material for its own figuration as it swept through a limitless digital inventory.

"Erotic Nature"

To decode John Dunkley’s dark and sexual landscape is also to reveal a decolonial message in his broader works. Dunkley humanizes nature through both masculinizing phallic and feminizing yonic symbolism as an emancipatory tactic, thereby reflecting a culturally nuanced relationship between people and landscape. Dunkley subverts the expected in Caribbean painting, especially for foreign consumers. By bringing nature to life, his paintings offer subversive anti-colonial themes, too, waiting for decipherment. This paper will examine Dunkley’s use of erotic imagery, arguing that the painter’s sexual landscapes, through layered poetics and symbolism, ultimately served to challenge every day oppressions in colonial Jamaica.

Open Book, Broken Flesh

While the immersive devotional context of the V&A booklet and the semiotic nature of its images of the arma Christi have long been recognized, this paper calls attention to the significance of the booklet’s physical form in relation to its function as a stimulus of (and channel for) devotion to Christ’s Passion. I argue that the underlying conceptual aspects of the booklet related to its codex format work in tandem with the content of its painted images and stood to enhance the efficaciousness of the booklet as a devotional tool by increasing the immediacy of its beholder’s encounter with Christ’s wounded body.

Injection versus Extraction

Socially Engaged Art (SEA) is a conventional yet emerging phenomenon at the broadest level. On one hand, art practices stimulated by and generated from social issues have taken a vital role along the development of modern and contemporary art, as we can now hardly indicate a single artwork that stands by its pure aesthetics; such situation only intensifies in the era of globalization, urbanization and information-explosion. On the other hand, while clusters of art practices appropriating and rebinding the social reality, a much longer list of analogous terminologies including public art, community art, participatory art, and activism art, are still enriching and complicating the concept SEA in the realm of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Visual and Textual Narratives

The True Cross, understood by the Christian faithful as the wood on which Christ was crucified, was legendarily discovered by Helena, the mother of Byzantine Emperor Constantine I, in 362 CE in Jerusalem. This discovery established imperial Byzantine control of the Cross and its relics, limiting their movement out of Byzantium. With the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204, reliquaries of the True Cross became more accessible. Many were taken west into the treasuries of Western European churches, where they can still be found today. The reception of these objects varied, but often, western viewers imposed new identities on these reliquaries by refashioning them or assigning them new narratives. One such reliquary of the True Cross that traveled from Byzantium to the west is now known as the Croce degli Zaccaria. In the pages that follow I will examine how the Byzantine identity of this reliquary was perceived as it moved through the medieval world.

Reflections on Gerhard Richter’s Cologne Cathedral Window

In this paper, my ambition is to provide some preliminary interpretations of Richter’s window exploring the complex triangulation of art, secularity, and religiosity within this work.

Living Rivers

In this essay I take up a new materialist lens to read Caycedo’s project, Be Dammed (2013 to Present), in which she works across media to counteract the anthropocentric perception of the environment that deems it subservient to human industry. In Be Dammed, Caycedo collaborates with local communities and resistance groups to create videos, multimedia sculptures, and participatory performances that contest the damming of rivers. This essay focuses specifically on Caycedo’s Geochoreographies, or collaborative performances, and her Cosmotarrayas, or hanging sculptures. I argue that by employing memory, collectivity, and performance, Caycedo’s Be Dammed project invites her audience, and in extension the larger global public, to adapt a greater attentiveness to the lively ecological networks that bind human practices and environmental devastation.

Beholding Chicano History

I consider Chicano History an ideal mural to expand on the analysis of form and content considering that it reflects the time in which it emerged: a period of civil disobedience and social unrest in which art, and art making was utilized for social mobilization and people awakening in order to effect social change.

Sarah Miriam Peale's Mary Leypold Griffith and the Staging of Republican Motherhood

Much of Sarah Miriam Peale’s work was done from observation – from life which begs the question: why would Peale depict Mary so very much alive and so mature when she had in fact passed away that year? This essay analyzes Peale’s portrait in relation to period ideas about gender, education, and death to argue that Peale aged and animated Mary in order to represent her as a young patriot. Thereby, the portrait aided her mother Priscilla’s mourning process, but also served as proof that—despite Mary’s premature death—Priscilla had fulfilled her maternal duties. In serving this function for Priscilla, the portrait served it for Sarah Miriam Peale, too. Although Peale had no children of her own, painting young patriots enabled the artist to contribute to the health of the Republic and thereby fulfill her maternal duties as well.

Paris-on-Hudson

In 1969, a curious picture entered the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, as part of a major bequest by American banker Robert Lehman (1891-1969). Identified as a Hudson River Scene, the painting, undated and unsigned, depicts an idyllic river landscape, surrounded by green hills, indeed reminiscent of the Hudson River School. Yet the attribution devised by the museum for might appear curious at first glance, as it does not rule out the possibility of a work produced by a little-known French painter named Victor de Grailly. Born in Paris in 1804, Grailly died in the same city in 1887. Mentioned in several museum collections, his pictures constitute a debatable body of work to this day. But if only a few biographical elements have been saved about the artist, the crunch of the debate lies elsewhere.