WELCOME
Welcome to the Ithaca College 2020 Senior Student Showcase – just in a very different format than any of us could have imagined. Again, again, again, & again remains a rumination on the shape of time and represents a genuine hope that by focusing on the cyclical nature of our lives we can discover new methods for interpreting the past, and, better yet, new methods for navigating our future.
My research and preparation for the show drew insight from Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of the Four Continents, a book based in political theory, which pulls from divergent modes of thinking. Lowe writes about the importance of complicating our perception of the past in order to better understand contemporaneity. She visualizes the stories that emerge from this approach as “braided histories” that interact and inform one other rather than existing separately. Inversely, she argues that structuring time as a linear progression from past to present is inadequate for comprehensively discussing the reverberating aftermath of our charged histories. “How might we understand mourning,” she writes, “when the event has yet to end?” (61).
Lowe implicitly points out that our sense of self is commensurate with our perception of time. Let me explain: each work showcased here is not a final product, produced by the “senior year version” of the artist. We are simultaneously all of the previous versions of ourselves, and the very process of creating art mimics this. Seldom is a work imagined, executed, and completed in a straightforward, bounded manner. Rather, the artistic process takes time – iteration and reiteration, growth and change, forward and backward, again and again. The process itself disrupts the concept of linearity.
In fact, the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier called creation a “patient search” – equal parts noun and verb. Each work showcased here is a reflection of the process that created it; while a painting may be the result of applying pigment to canvas, or a soundscape the result of editing audio files, really it is the culmination of a lifetime of lived experience.
This is about where my original curatorial essay ended, long before I knew what COVID-19 had in store for the class of 2020. But it feels disingenuous to continue as though we aren’t dealing with absolutely massive changes to our daily lives – and not the g-word that we were expecting to be dealing with right about now. I speak here, of course, of ‘graduation,’ a word that carries with it the finality of completing our undergraduate education, but also the unpredictability of entering the professional world.
In many ways, this pandemic is absolutely unprecedented: shelter in place orders, mandated business closures, cancelled classes, concerts, and conferences, not to mention the abrupt end to our routine, and arguably, life as we know it. As Columbia Professor Keith Moxey synthesizes in his book Visual Time, “... we are being overwhelmed by history… time is [collapsing] into an eternal present” (41). For many of us it can feel like running towards the future, only to have history steal the present from us before we can even mourn its loss.
But during this moment of great uncertainty, I urge you to look for the familiar: we are still creating routines, still seeking out human connection and creative outlets, turning new ideas over in our heads, finding inspiration in monotony, still learning, still growing, still changing – again, again, again, & again.
All my best,
Abigail Haley