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I'LL TAKE YOU TO AN HONEST PLACE
PARSONS DESIGN HISTORY AND PRACTICE BFA THESIS EXHIBITION AT BEVERLY'S
The inaugural class of the BFA in Design History and Practice at Parsons School of Design share the research that inspired and facilitated their thesis projects. With a focus on the importance of making alongside theory, this group engages art and design research through transdisciplinary and experimental practices.
Presentations by our graduating seniors: Kenlee Danner, Meg Farrar, Juliette Fratto, Amal Flower Kay, and Isla de Luca
This paper studies the thematic use of female figures in relation with nature, animals and fantastic beasts in the works of female artists from approximately 1890-1950 in cultural centres of New York and Paris. Through the research, I travel from Art Nouveau, through Early Modernism, to Surrealist works that epitomize the climax of this theme.
The Silk of the Nazca Spider is a personal video essay examining innate human curiosity through the history of the Nazca Lines and the work of Maria Reiche. The “A roll” of the piece depicts a process video of the artist felting the Nazca Spider into the back of a blue wool jacket with purple acrylic yarn and the Orion constellation in white wool roving.
We enter into this world naked without a care. As we grow older, the expression of life and the Self as fashioned through fashion is solidified no matter how intentional our style choices. Upon our demise, this expression of Self becomes even more significant--what you wear in your casket not only expresses your view of the afterlife and the value placed on your physical presence on Earth, but also how you wish to appear to others. Through analyzing historical examples of memorialization and the burial clothing of Marilyn Monroe in conjunction with auto-ethnographic accounts of my own mother’s burial outfit, this paper will explore the ways in which clothing choices transcend ideas of the “present.” Regardless of celebrity or lay person status, the desire to remain in or communicate one’s idealized image and power is eternal and ever present. Importantly, this eternal ideation persists despite the distinction between those who make a conscious choice to choose what to wear for their burial and those who might not get a chance to do the same.
Recently I found myself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram and I stumbled upon a corner of the internet I never knew existed. The image was of Sarah Jessica Parker portraying Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and The City, except something was off. The image had been altered so that her eyes were slightly slanted, the bridge of her nose had been thinned and her lips were plumped with fillers. At first glance I probably would have scrolled past the image and not taken note of the slight alteration. We see so many images on Instagram that we often do not process one filtered selfie from the next. However, what I found most striking here was the altering of the past.
This recorded presentation describes the objecthood, archival elements, and historical context of Your House is Mine, an artist book produced as a reaction to the New York City housing crisis of the 80s. Your House is Mine explores the intersections of public health, racism, and police brutality with homelessness - issues that unfortunately are particularly resonant today in New York, as homeless encampments are violently removed across the city.
This saree fragment from the eighteenth century comprises an earthy Indian appeal and gauze-like weave. It serves not only as a visual treat but also as an immersive tactile object that narrates sagas of craftsmanship, patronage and culture. The fragment can be identified as a part of what would have been an exquisite Paithani saree – a symbol of regality and virtue. It measures one-fifth (fifty-five inches by twenty-four inches) of what an actual saree would measure. The semi-refined edges of this rectangular fabric point toward the fact of it being a part of a larger fabric, i.e. a saree. It is a plain weave with discontinuous supplementary weft patterning, woven probably using the dovetail tapestry method.
This experimental essay examines the visual and material politics of the 1973 oil shock through the combination of image, text, performativity, and light. Meant to be handled, the experience is composed to immerse the reader in a historical imaginary with gestures that intimate the movement of documents across the bureaucrat’s desk, the longhand notes and microfilm of the archive, and the solicitation of user agency to energize the narrative.
Sometime between 1763 and 1764, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson—more commonly known as the Marquise de Pompadour or Madame de Pompadour—sat for the last portrait of her life at the age of 42. François-Hurburt Drouais painted Pompadour in this portrait, titled Madame de Pompadour at Her Tambour Frame, that he completed a few weeks after her death on April 5, 1674 (Fig. 1). The infamous mistress-turned-friend of King Louis XV of France commissioned numerous portraits throughout her 19 years at Versailles. These portraits by various artists have been interpreted retrospectively as being particularly attuned to the current events of her life, stylistic changes of the period, and her conscious construction of identity. Moreover, recent scholarship has articulated her active role in the fashioning of these portraits—to the extent that her agency in mediating their production can be understood as a performance of identity.1 This last portrait of Madame de Pompadour especially exposes this performativity and self-fashioning at a critical period of transition and change in eighteenth-century French socioeconomic and fashion history.
As a Curatorial Fellow in Cooper Hewitt's Textiles Department, Charlotte von Hardenburgh recently completed her curatorial capstone for the upcoming exhibition and first-ever monographic publication of American textile designer, Dorothy Liebes (1897–1972). von Hardenburgh’s presentation highlights Liebes’s influence across the country and a swath of disciplines, from textiles to interiors, transportation and industrial design, fashion, and film. Her research builds off the foundational findings of Cooper Hewitt’s curatorial team, including Alexa Griffith, Manager of Content + Curriculum and Susan Brown, Acting Head of Textiles. Financial support to facilitate this research was awarded by the Parsons Student Research Fund. Additional research insights were generously provided by the family of Emma Amos, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, WGBH’s Open Vault archive, the Transportation Library of Northwestern University, and the invaluable digitized records held at the Archives of American Art.
The female body, from the outer garments, skin, hair, to the bodily orifices, to the internal body organs, has been disciplined by the patriarchal social norms and aesthetics. However, the enactments of experimental art disrupt the homogeneous ways in which the female body is constructed within mainstream discourses. Experimental performances reveal the potential of the creative power of the body; experimental performers/artists go beyond categories that have traditionally been used to limit women’s bodies and ultimately transgress the boundaries of the female body.
In this thesis, the focus is on the experimental artist, Narcissister, who aims at questioning the mainstream aesthetics and conventions of female and the female body, taking her performances as the main research object to explore how Narcissister interprets the female body from the outside to the inside through the intersecting practices of fashion, art, and performance. This thesis defines three aspects of the female body that are significant in Narcissister’s work — the external body, body as boundary-breaking, and the internal body — and regard the female body represented in Narcissister’s work as the grotesque body and an attempt to move beyond the dominant dichotomy of holy-or-slutty discourse around women.
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